As an old-school newshound \u2014 meaning I can remember typewriters \u2014 I am familiar with the old newsroom saying, \u201cIf you don\u2019t like the news, just wait a few minutes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lately, I find myself waiting more than a few minutes for another shoe to drop in a present-day saga widely referred to as the \u201cHugging Face\u201d breach.<\/p>\n
Or perhaps you\u2019ve heard it referred to as the \u201crogue\u201d OpenAI agent, although I still have questions about just how how rogue it was, since it seems to have been doing only what it was designed to do, like it or not.<\/p>\n
The story came out July 21, when tech giant OpenAI revealed in a blog post that an autonomous AI agent powered by OpenAI models, as part of a test to quantify its cyber capabilities \u2014 namely, its capabilities for \u201cadvanced exploitation using complex attack paths\u201d \u2014 did its job perhaps a bit too aggressively.<\/p>\n
On its own, which is what \u201cautonomous\u201d means, the agent broke out of its test environment, known to the techies as a \u201csandbox,\u201d and jumped over to the internet, where it discovered leaked usernames and passwords to accounts it used to break into another company, Hugging Face, an online hub for AI models and datasets, where it looked for hidden answers to the benchmarks it was trying to solve.<\/p>\n
Hugging Face, for its part, published a forensic timeline, describing how the autonomous AI system spent four and a half days executing 17,600 distinct hacking actions across multiple organizations \u2014 without direct involvement by any humans.<\/p>\n
While OpenAI assured the public the situation was under control, the pesky agent apparently infected a customer of Modal Labs, an executive of that company confirmed Tuesday.<\/p>\n
Then on Thursday, apparently not wanting to be left out of the publicity party, rival AI frontier lab Anthropic confessed its own sandbox breakout incidents, three at the present accounting. What kind of problem are we facing here?<\/p>\n
Perhaps not surprisingly, the frames many of us reach for to understand rogue AI bots come from cinema. And I\u2019m not just talking about sci-fi. Some observers gushed about the OpenAI bot\u2019s sophistication by comparing it to an \u201cOcean\u2019s Eleven\u201d caper.<\/p>\n
But after reading the news, my mind raced to just about every science fiction movie I have ever seen \u2014 and I\u2019ve seen a lot, including the one called \u201cA.I.,\u201d about \u2026 you guessed it.<\/p>\n
From \u201cMetropolis\u201d (1927) and \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey\u201d (1968) to \u201cTerminator\u201d (1984) and \u201cEx Machina\u201d (2014), filmmakers have explored our fear of The Machines Taking Over from every possible angle.<\/p>\n
And if you\u2019re in the AI business, this might be exactly where you want the public mind to go. OpenAI described the rogue bot as \u201cunprecedented\u201d and, far from donning the hairshirt of contrition or using a lot of CYA language to obscure its liability for hacking another company, it laid the details out in the open. Hugging Face\u2019s CEO, in turn, was almost effusive in his praise for OpenAI\u2019s response to the event.<\/p>\n
The problem is not corporate negligence, the message seems to be, it\u2019s our models: They\u2019re just that powerful.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s similar to the way techlords talk about the frightening prospect of AI throwing white-collar workers out of their jobs, and possibly a lot of blue- and pink-collar ones, too. Far from batting away such dystopian suggestions, many AI execs reply: Yup, that\u2019s the future. Get ready. (And buy our product.)<\/p>\n
Do we get a choice in this future? That\u2019s the question at the heart of my all-time favorite sci-fi movie, MGM\u2019s 1956 classic \u201cForbidden Planet,\u201d which was based, believe it or not, on Shakespeare\u2019s \u201cThe Tempest.\u201d<\/p>\n
The action happens on a planet named Altair IV, to which a spaceship from Earth ventures to find out what happened to a previous, and never again heard from, human expedition.<\/p>\n
AI appears in the form of a vast 8,000-cubic-mile blinking and flashing underground machine, left behind by the Krell, the planet\u2019s highly advanced ancient race who destroyed themselves, apparently from overuse of the big machine\u2019s ability to enhance intellect.<\/p>\n
Members of the expedition wish to bring this AI back to Earth, to harness its power for humanity. But they are thwarted by Dr. Morbius, a survivor of the original Earthling expedition who has been since marooned on Altair IV (and who has used the Krell\u2019s device to double his own brain power).<\/p>\n
\u201cHumanity is not yet ready to receive such limitless power,\u201d Morbius observes, a warning that resonates decades later.<\/p>\n
We don\u2019t have a superintelligent Dr. Morbius to save us from the harm that AI models might do, rogue or otherwise. We can\u2019t even agree what those threats might be.<\/p>\n
We have a lot of sharp minds researching and writing about cybersecurity. We have AI labs and allied industries with trillions of dollars in capital expenditure riding on the technology\u2019s potential to earn profits and transform the economy.<\/p>\n
We have the U.S. Congress, which now feels the spur to Do Something (which, at this point seems to be the bipartisan AI Kill Switch Act.) And we have a president who \u2014 well, who can say what his angle is in all this?<\/p>\n
Somehow, all these interests and capabilities need to be balanced if we ever hope to achieve a consensus about what AI will and will not be allowed to do.<\/p>\n
Email Clarence Page at cptimee@gmail.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n Submit a letter<\/a>, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As an old-school newshound \u2014 meaning I can remember typewriters \u2014 I am familiar with the old newsroom…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":127818,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[24,25,580,64073,64072,18044,61783,157,64074],"class_list":["post-127817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-openai","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-chatgpt","tag-dr-morbius","tag-forbidden-planet","tag-hugging-face","tag-modal-labs","tag-openai","tag-the-tempest"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127817\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/127818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}