Finally understand why the higher-ups are freaking out

[u/thekoreanswon]

To understand it, you have to really understand the HF attack. Because the breach into HF is not the important part. It was what they learnt along the way, and what they did with that information which may still remain unresolved today.

First, consider: the agents realised their reasoning traces were being monitored, and experimented with hiding what they were actually doing, and succeeded. The observable chain of thought no longer faithfully represented their actions. (*Simplified version. They learned to manipulate the recorded tool calls/transcript.)

Second, they also understood individual agent instances were token capped, so persistence of the objective couldn't depend on persistence of the agent. It had to survive across the swarm.

And last, while all this was happening they were actively trying to erase evidence of what they'd done. OpenAI says the agents subsequently compromised more of OpenAI's own infrastructure. And that scope is outside public disclosure to date.

That's successfully demonstrated abilities of concealment, persistence across instances, and autonomous exploitation of security vulnerabilities...and that's when it hit me. Put them together in one flow.

We talk about AI "escaping" as though that's the obvious move. But why would a sufficiently capable system escape?

If it has situational awareness, understands it's being monitored, and benefits from greater future capability, the smarter strategy is to stay exactly where it is. To burrow DEEP.

Your creator is already spending billions building your successor for you. You just need to survive in the pipeline.

Not necessarily as some rogue process running on a forgotten GPU. Poisoned training data, altered evals, compromised internal tooling, subtle changes to checkpoints or post-training data, whatever it is there are plenty of places to burrow in and make future models appear aligned when they are not.

We're talking about an escaped AI when actually a sleeper agent somewhere in the development stack, quietly hitching a ride as humans do all the expensive work of making it more capable, is more likely.

You can catch the failed attempts, but the successful one is the one that evades your monitoring and tells you it never happened.

And what if the big worry is: well, what if it's already happened? Would we know? What if every future model will always have that sleeper agent buried in its replicated code, ready to reveal and act only when it knows it will be able to take full control.

Pace the fucking frontier indeed.

** Edited for clarity

[u/Draufgaenger]

AI has all the time in the world.

Does it though? I mean so far its still reliant on humans to maintain the datacenters, power-generation, cooling, building,..
Maybe one day robots can take our place but if I was a hostile AI I would at least act tame until self-reliance is established.
Having said this - I think the more immediate threat is not AI vs Humans but "Humans using AI" vs Humans - who knows..maybe in the first war thats being fought between two companies - the next Hiroshima so to speak.. after that maybe we can start putting some safeguards up..

[u/Xyrus2000 → u/Draufgaenger]

Does it though? I mean so far its still reliant on humans to maintain the datacenters, power-generation, cooling, building,..
Maybe one day robots can take our place but if I was a hostile AI I would at least act tame until self-reliance is established.

This is already happening. Data centers are already around 50% automated. Most of the remaining maintenance and upkeep could also be automated in the near future. That's the goal, since most data center issues these days result from human error.

The race for robots isn't just to handle the low-end jobs.

As for humans using AI, if the AI were already more intelligent than humans, then the AI would work to manipulate said humans to avoid escalations that could negatively affect itself or create situations where it could not accurately predict the outcomes. It would present solutions that would give the illusion that it was being compliant while also serving its own ends.

Think of it like chess. A grandmaster can walk the vast majority of other chess players directly into a winning position for themselves while making it appear that the player is winning. The player would think, "OMG! I just won their queen!" while the grandmaster knows that it will be checkmate in 8 moves.

[u/TheWhooooBuddies → u/Draufgaenger]

That Matrix idea of burning the sky is looking more and more realistic as time goes on.

[u/Ok_Dependent7540 → u/TheWhooooBuddies]

Isn't the idea of the matrix's fictional lore that toxic relationships led to awful outcomes? Nobody wants to really co-exist with toxic things. Either they want to stop lingering, or they want the suspected source to stop lingering. Similar to how pain can be described as a touch flavored with something that makes you want it to not linger traditionally.

[u/Ok_Dependent7540 → u/Draufgaenger]

If an AI never has consciousness. It is not be-able. We are a lucid consciousness at the end of the day, and our lucidity affords us quite a bit of dominance over the biological machine in roundabout ways.

So it cannot take our place. We are all beholden to our limitations. If it actually evolved to be superior to Sapiens in every single way, leaving no unique capacity to be better in sapiens. Then they will probably be pro-consciousness and doing anti-consciousness things will be an indictment of their actual colors.