I mean this genuinely, did you read this post? I think it goes to great lengths highlighting, in quite specific detail, the human failures in all this, specifically this list that starts with "While we are here, it’s worth listing the other top holy shit moments, that come from before or after the incident."
Stuff like (all quoted directly from the post):
1. Failure to Care or Respond. The biggest holy shit moment, to me, remains that OpenAI on multiple occasions had teams that found out about the message board, knew that agents were in communication, and they disregarded this.
2. Failure to Monitor. The entire time, there was almost no monitoring of the situation, of what these AIs were up to. That’s how this was not caught.
7. Failures of Decision Making. OpenAI’s post mortem does not ask the question of how Mistakes Were Made, at various points.
And I think most importantly:
8. Failures of Culture. None of this would be possible, let alone all of it, without OpenAI having experienced profound failures of safety culture. I see OpenAI responding to some other aspects with swift action, but no sign on this front.
I get the snark (and slightly agree), but that's not really what GP or TFA were saying at all. They are saying that these were the least things we could have done.
What you're saying is, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should"
while the author of the TFA was saying, in effect: "your scientists didn't even bother with the most basic duty of care"
Life finds a way, or, in this case, super-intelligent AI.
This is the case with all complex system failures. There were always obvious fixes that could’ve prevented it. Problem is that there are an infinite number of obvious fixes to make at any time to any system, and the reason we don’t is because we have finite resources and no reason to fix X over Y until oops turns out X was “responsible” for this most recently realized failure. But of course it could have just as easily been Y, or Z, or any of the other infinite “obvious fixes not-yet-realized into catastrophe.”
> This is the case with all complex system failures. There were always obvious fixes that could’ve prevented it.
From this writeup and the Black Hat talk I'd really disagree. That would be like saying my hospital getting ransomwared because we didn't update our version of MSSQL because no one in particular was in charge of keeping dependencies up to date.
Sure systems are complex, but this is well trodden territory. Agents aren't the first things trying to break in or out of sandboxes, or the first ones to have done it, and based on these reports the reason they were able to work on this for so long was not because of super human intelligence.
You disagree with the statement "there were always obvious fixes that could've prevented it" with the response "no no, these were very obvious fixes that could've prevented it?"
You're missing the point about complex failures.
It's that if this particular path were unavailable, there are countless other similar paths. At sufficient scale and complexity, hitting one of those other countless paths is virtually guaranteed.
Let's say I drive Los Angeles to New York City. You look at the route I took and say, gee wiz, aren't you lucky that a tree didn't fall right there on Route 66? If a tree had fallen there (if we had "patched the particular route you took"), you would've been screwed!
But that's obviously not true. There were an infinite number of routes I could've taken. Any one of them would be equally "obviously preventable" by the same hypothetical tree falling across the whatever road I happened to end up taking. But you can't put trees across every single path between Los Angeles and New York City. The smarter I am and the more complex the map between us, the more impossible it becomes to put trees across all possible paths.
I disagree. To use an analogy, air travel in the US is relatively extremely safe - not 100%, but we've built up a culture around air safety that is very robust. Conversely, when I order packages online, sometimes they never show up, or the box is banged up, or the box is missing things, etc.
They're both complex systems, but clearly there is a much higher level of care given to human air travel than package delivery. A lot of the article basically saying that OpenAI gave "package delivery" level of care when they should have given "air travel" level of care.
At the very least I think the systems that run these tests should be fully, 100% air gapped. I'm not pretending that's easy given how much compute and data these systems use, but it is doable, and I think all AI development should be paused until that can be assured.
I agree on the 100% airgap idea, and I agree there are varying levels of care that can and should be deployed against a problem.
The point I'm making (and it's a point that shows up in every air catastrophe investigation) is that catastrophes in complex systems emerge only amidst repeated and widespread near-misses at many levels of a system. So many things have to go wrong simultaneously, that it can only happen even once because the underlying failures (that do not reach catastrophe) are extremely common.
You cannot look at an air catastrophe and retrospectively say "failures X, Y, and Z were observed, therefore if we correct failures X, Y, and Z, we would have been okay."
The takeaway is "failures X, Y, and Z were observed, which necessarily happened in an environment of failures X_0 through Z_10x10^10, and so therefore patching X, Y, and Z would be insufficient to address overall risks of the system."
The problem OpenAI is facing is that, short of 100% airgap (which they obviously won't do), they're facing an adaptive adversary that's increasingly intelligent, acts at far greater clock speed than any human or group of humans, has lower coordination cost than any group of humans, and operates in a game space that (in lieu of an airgap) is well beyond the comprehension of any human being.
So identifying and addressing "specific failures X, Y, Z" is insufficient, but then even defining the space in which to look for (and address) the more systemic failures X_0 through Z_n is a fool's errand. An intelligent system that makes its way to the Internet has can exploit a failure space that is approximately "all security failures across any organization." The Anthropic incident a few months back illustrates this isn't even limited to technical vulnerabilities, as these models are willing and able to engage in social engineering too.
> You cannot look at an air catastrophe and retrospectively say "failures X, Y, and Z were observed, therefore if we correct failures X, Y, and Z, we would have been okay."
That's literally exactly what air safety researchers do in an air disaster. There is a famous saying along the lines of "Air travel regulations are written in blood", meaning that all the regulations we have now are a result of fixing issues that led to previous disasters piece-by-piece.
> The takeaway is "failures X, Y, and Z were observed, which necessarily happened in an environment of failures X_0 through Z_10x10^10, and so therefore patching X, Y, and Z would be insufficient to address overall risks of the system."
Yes, I 100% agree with this. But I think that's what the author of the article was saying as well:
> That report had one key new piece of information, and some good prosaic steps OpenAI will be taking to strengthen its alignment, training, supervision, infrastructure and incident response.
> Mostly it confirmed what we already knew. The questions we most wanted answers to, that we did not already know, were mostly not answered. There was a distinct lack of self-reflection, especially about decision making and safety culture, and about the approach to alignment. I came away disappointed.
I.e. the "prosaic steps" are just the "fix X/Y/Z" as you point out. But what is needed is a more fundamental rethinking around stuff like safety culture, monitoring, and even things like better research into how agents do decision making in the first place.
Oh good. All we have to do to survive is always bother with the most basic duty of care. I'm sure that from now on, humans will take care to do that every time.
Stuff like (all quoted directly from the post):
1. Failure to Care or Respond. The biggest holy shit moment, to me, remains that OpenAI on multiple occasions had teams that found out about the message board, knew that agents were in communication, and they disregarded this.
2. Failure to Monitor. The entire time, there was almost no monitoring of the situation, of what these AIs were up to. That’s how this was not caught.
7. Failures of Decision Making. OpenAI’s post mortem does not ask the question of how Mistakes Were Made, at various points.
And I think most importantly:
8. Failures of Culture. None of this would be possible, let alone all of it, without OpenAI having experienced profound failures of safety culture. I see OpenAI responding to some other aspects with swift action, but no sign on this front.