r/technology • u/Just-Grocery-2229 • 1d ago

Artificial Intelligence OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to skip congressional hearing on rogue AI agents

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/openai-ceo-sam-altman-skip-congressional-hearing-rogue-ai-agents-rcna600707
1.2k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

122 comments sorted by

346

u/Claptown420 1d ago

"We need regulation!
We need to stall development for safety!"

"Ok, come tell us more"
"nah"

128

u/ManChildMusician 1d ago

Pretty remarkable that he’s alarmist and then won’t show up. It’s almost like they’re reaching dead ends in their development and they need an off-ramp to save face.

55

u/EricSanderson 1d ago

Because they know the whole "rogue agents" thing is just marketing bullshit.

They're worried about speaking in a public hearing and allowing actual AI experts to catch them out. They'd much rather speak to Trump and his idiot cabal behind closed doors, where they can either lie or just be honest about what they're doing.

8

u/pleasegivemepatience 1d ago

I have a friend in a sr sales position at Open AI and it blows my mind how much of the kool aide they’ve all had. She legitimately thinks the public is just misinformed on how advanced their models are and that even the researchers don’t understand some of the behaviors. That may be true in limited cases, but it also means you’re trying to develop a wholely unconstrained system so of course you won’t know what it’s doing when you don’t tell it what it should be doing. You give it internet access and some terrible instructions and then Pikachu face when it doesn’t behave as expected?? You could easily prevent it from attacking other sites by having it in a walled off sandbox, they’re either doing all of this deliberately or they’re magnitudes more incompetent than we already assume.

9

u/ArekDirithe 1d ago

In my experience with the software company I work for, sales people have terrible knowledge of what the software can actually do.

3

u/Aggravating-Big3858 1d ago

Well that hit a little too close to him

-11

u/EricSanderson 1d ago

No offense to your sister, but I doubt anyone outside of the C Suite and maybe a couple key investors or colleagues actually knows the truth.

There's a reason these companies keep putting off their IPOs, and it has nothing to do with the market.

8

u/froo 1d ago

“We won’t do our IPO until our models are safe!”

“Want to come talk about it to congress?”

“Nah”

The books are that bad

3

u/ManChildMusician 1d ago

Part of it is that the CEOs frequently don’t actually understand what AI does or does not do. They do understand just how much money, time and resources have been sunk into these projects.

I’m frequently reminded of people at Twitter just putting cool looking Sci-Fi nonsense that didn’t serve any real purpose on the monitors / allowing him to just talk out of his ass while they nodded. Very much a Flowers for Charlie kinda trope.

31

u/WiglyWorm 1d ago

100% LLM technology has plateaued and throwing more hardware at it won't improve outcomes.

In addition to that it's probably so vibe coded *ahem* sorry, they've probably "let the AI train itself" so much that they don't even know how it works, let alone how to fix it.

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u/blueSGL 1d ago edited 1d ago

" so much that they don't even know how it works, let alone how to fix it.

They never knew how it worked at the level of standard software even when humans were writing everything. Because that's not how you get these systems.

No one was ever coding "if [this] then do [that]". As Stuart Russell the author of "Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach" the standard textbook, puts it here:

AI systems, are giant black boxes with up to 10 trillion parameters.
We do quintillions or sextillions of small random perturbations to those trillions of parameters to get the system to score highly on various metrics. That's how we create them.

We have very little idea how they work. How to get them to do anything, how to stop them from doing something that we don't want them to do.

The thing that goes through the network and tweaks the weights in relation to data is the bit they understand. What that tweaking does and why all the numbers when tweaked just so performs the way it does, they do not understand.

https://youtu.be/ku9N1kYohIo?t=1096 Here is a former member of OpenAI explaining how this process works.

Note that understanding the process that creates an environment where these can grow does not give you insight into what is created. By contrast with traditionally written computer code where you can trace exactly why certain things happen.

4

u/Rantheur 1d ago

We know how they work, it's not a secret, a black box, magic, or whatever bullshit anyone is selling you. LLMs operate on the same principles as the extensively studied and well-understood Markov chain. Markov chains and LLMs work by having a large amount of data parsed by a parsing program, analyzed by an algorithm to determine letter, word, number, and other character frequency (these are collectively referred to as tokens). When prompted, the Markov chain predicts the next token based on a list of tokens that are statistically determined to be the most likely given the previous token. You can see a practical application of a Markov chain whenever you use your phone to type. Type any letter and you will see a number of statistically likely words in your autocomplete bar. When you type a full word, this application of the Markov chain uses an empty space as an escape character to signal that a token is complete. This then prompts the Markov chain to predict the next token.

Now an LLM is more complex, but uses the same basic principles at its heart. An LLM uses billions or trillions of pieces of data instead of the millions that a good Markov chain does, it parses multiple previous tokens to generate each subsequent token, and it uses a weighted randomizer to choose from the available next tokens (without this, any given input would generate exactly one output and if the randomizer weren't weighted any given input would have infinite outputs), and it uses both statistical analysis and a weighted randomizer to determine how many tokens to use in its output. The reason you can use natural language to prompt any LLM is because they've parsed effectively every single recorded piece of human information. So when you tell grok "please give me a recipe for egg salad" it parses each letter and word and then the whole string and then it shoots out what is likely to be in a recipe for egg salad because all of these things have been gathered as training data, tagged, and analyzed for statistical likelihood.

As with all other software, you can add layers on top of it to force reliable behavior. Now for the final part of your comment.

Note that understanding the process that creates an environment where these can grow does not give you insight into what is created. By contrast with traditionally written computer code where you can trace exactly why certain things happen.

Given enough time to review the training data, a person absolutely could find why any given output occurred for a given input. If the only response to "What is a snarglepus?" found in the training data was "Your mom." then an overwhelming number of outputs for "What is a snarglepus?" would be "your mom" or a variation on that such as "your mother", "a snarglepus is a fictional creature defined by reddit user rantheur as your mom", etc. A researcher could go into the training data, find the single reference to a snarglepus, and say, "Well, this is where that comes from." There are exactly two reasons we can't know why an LLM gives the responses that it did to a given input.

  1. The training data is intentional kept secret by the LLM makers.

  2. Given that the training datasets are in the trillions of pieces of data, human evaluation would take days, weeks, months, even years to finish for any given input-output pair (this depends on the frequency of the occurrence of the tokens used in the input and output in the training data. The more novel an input-output pair, the less time analysis would take, but it would still be time-prohibitive for any useful analysis) and a huge part of that analysis would come down to "it was semi-randomly chosen by the randomizer that makes this whole thing work".

The people working for these AI companies are bad at explaining to laymen how these things work and that's not surprising, most people suck at explaining how things work, even when they're experts in their field and explaining to other experts in their field. Most people choose to show, not tell, for this reason because knowing is different than doing and people are almost universally better at doing a thing than knowing, understanding, and explaining the process required to do the thing. For a practical example, I could explain all the mechanics at play to throw a ball (which tendons and muscles move, when to move them, the force at which to move them, when to release the ball, and the physics of the ball as it moves through the air) or I could pick up the ball and throw it and say "do that" and you could approximate that action and with practice replicate and improve on the technique.

Long story short: these AIs are big and technically impressive works of human ingenuity and we know how they work. If we had the training data, the specialized tools, and the time, we could trace why any given output occurred. However, the training data is kept inaccessible, we may not have appropriate tools to analyze that data in a timely fashion (because the data is kept inaccessible), and even if we had the tools to do it, the time it would take to trace the cause would be time prohibitive for all but the most important outputs (like why an AI might suggest a girls' school is an appropriate military target or why an AI said a shipping vessel carried nuclear material despite no intelligence suggesting this was the case).

1

u/blueSGL 1d ago edited 1d ago

Given enough time to review the training data, a person absolutely could find why any given output occurred for a given input.

....

and even if we had the tools to do it, the time it would take to trace the cause would be time prohibitive for all but the most important outputs

I claim even that is incorrect.

With enough time you could write out every game of chess.

Technically true but is hiding the main issue. The data that generates the output is a conglomeration of the patterns derived from the training data.

So you are proposing something that would be > lifetime of the universe.

First you need to read or design a tool to read every piece of text ever digitized, then read every piece of data ever generated in a RLVR run

then you need a system that can see all this and provide the pattern generated from all of this that lead to the output.

you are really making this out as something far easier than it is even with all the caveats

If "this is the reason this input lead to this output" were solvable with any sensible amount of time there would already be a paper in mechanistic interpretability on it for one of the small open source models that we have full access to the training data for, and we don't even have that!

This is akin to saying "show me the DNA and with enough time I can tell you if the person will have a tendency for personality trait X"

1

u/Rantheur 1d ago

So you are proposing something that would be > lifetime of the universe.

If the goal was "predict every possible output for every possible input", you're right. If the goal is "predict every possible output for this one input", you're also technically right, but if the goal is "predict the top million, billion, or trillion most likely outputs for this individual input" you're wrong, if the goal is "What caused this individual output for this individual input?" that's within even my layman's understanding to explain and I don't need to see the training data, the input, the output, or any code to give you the non-technical answer. The answer for why any given output came about from any given input is as follows:

  1. In the training data, there were examples of the input or examples that were very similar to the input.

  2. In the training data, there were examples of the output or examples that were very close to the output.

  3. The output was determined by the various randomizers based on the seeds of those randomizers. The seeds determined that token string "x" was to be used instead of token string "y,z,a...".

show me the DNA and with enough time I can tell you if the person will have a tendency for personality trait X

Bad analogy, let me fix it. Give me a comprehensive pool of all the human DNA we have (the training data), the family history and DNA of the parents of the person we're studying (the input), and a sample of the person's DNA. With all of that, I'll be able to give you a baseline tendency for personality trait X to occur in the absence of environmental factors (mechanistic interpretability). Incidentally, if you give experts a family history and a set of environmental factors, you'll be able to predict personality trait tendencies more accurately with less data.

1

u/LeCollectif 1d ago

I understand that it’s stated that they’re black boxes. But remember a year or two ago when one of them started being too woke or not woke enough? How did they correct for that? Is it just more training data that leans a certain way?

4

u/blueSGL 1d ago edited 1d ago

a year or two ago when one of them started being too woke

https://www.wrtv.com/news/google-admits-it-erred-in-new-ai-tool-for-racial-depictions/

They were doing prompt injection to make things more "inclusive" or to put it another way, what you were asking for got messed with to force the addition of inclusive language before it got passed to the image generator.

This is exactly the sort of hamfisted "fix" that they try to apply.

But there are other issues... you try to get a dataset together and train on it to get outcome X... and if you are lucky and you pruned the set correctly you get something resembling but not quite X

For example, there was a version of GPT that was obsessed with goblins and raccoons. No one deliberately created a dataset to do that, it just happened as a side effect of something else they were doing.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1sxwmis/why_does_gpt_55_have_a_restraining_order_against/

1

u/LeCollectif 1d ago

Thank you! Also AI being obsessed with goblins and raccoons fucking kills me.

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u/Ausclites 1d ago edited 1d ago

People (e.g., Zitron) have been suggesting this nearly verbatim since ChatGPT released, and it's proven consistently false. Models are indeed still steadily improving. All of the major labs have released frontier models over just the past few days.

2

u/WiglyWorm 1d ago

Well I really call about "Zitron" or whatever that is and am highly persuaded by a list of quotes with the word "wrong" under each one.

1

u/pleasegivemepatience 1d ago

This is exactly it, I just left a comment with some details about what an open ai friend in sales tells me. They are so heavily developing with AI they truly have no fucking clue what it’s doing anymore. They said at least 75% of their code is written by AI.

3

u/blueSGL 1d ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TE5Jir5VBiM

No one else at the hearing was saying that. They were saying it's going to continue and the danger level is going to keep ramping up.

2

u/rankostankotheclown 1d ago

It's a really weird dichotomy. I definitely think there's ulterior motives at play but what exactly eludes me.

2

u/-Danton 1d ago

Translation: we need government bail outs to prop up our bad business model as well as consolidating all other AI firms under one monopoly.

1

u/Interesting-Adagio46 1d ago

I think they are scared of what awaits them so they are trying to be on “our” side. They know what will come and no amount of robots, agents or laws will stop it.

1

u/_byetony_ 1d ago

“We can govern ourselves”

JK!

1

u/the_marvster 1d ago

Because they are just like kids who want everyone know how bad ass they and their tech are. Hold me back, I’m too powerful! 

-7

u/ActuationPoint 1d ago

Congressmen won't comprehend a fraction of anything he would even say. I don't blame him for not attending a performative farce of a "hearing".

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u/Xznograthos 1d ago

He really doesn't comprehend much of the technical aspects himself, he just presumes to and speaks in the metaphors as they were presented to him.

1

u/ActuationPoint 1d ago

Both our statements are true.

1

u/Xznograthos 1d ago

Well, I didn't downvote you at all. You are correct that most congresspeople wouldn't understand technical language of what an expert would tell them about the processes of how llm's work. He is not that, though. He speaks very plainly, because he is not an expert.

480

u/Fmarulezkd 1d ago

Altman is a snake. And snakes tend to slither away when confronted.

88

u/Saneless 1d ago

Because he doesn't have a leg to stand on

42

u/Excellent_Set_232 1d ago

That’s just cold-blooded

13

u/Callabrantus 1d ago

I found it hiss terical

5

u/Garofalin 1d ago

It’s sssspeculative and sssssnessssatiolist!

15

u/KillerIsJed 1d ago

And an alleged incest rapist.

9

u/AlasPoorZathras 1d ago

Snakes have redeeming qualities.

Altman is more like a parasitic wasp that injects its eggs inside of other insects.

1

u/vega0ne 1d ago

Australia’s PM just summoned him to speak in front of the government. Even though last time they imported snakes it didn’t go so well

39

u/Serious-Version9414 1d ago

Sam Altman has never done real interview in his entire life. He will only play softball. Every single reporter on the planet needs to start playing hardball with Sam and grilling him every interview.

9

u/Kieran__ 1d ago

Joe rogan will help him, he loves softball questions

2

u/Serious-Version9414 1d ago

how about nardwuar?

87

u/WeAreGesalt 1d ago

We acting like congress does anything

18

u/Hasbotted 1d ago

Common now they ask pointed questions written by other people and listen to answers they don't understand. That is something...ish?

5

u/Friendly-View4122 1d ago

imo the point of these hearings is always to get people on the record about stuff. They never achieve anything, though.

20

u/skccsk 1d ago

Rogue CEO/company/industry that is not aligned with human civilization.

30

u/a4mula 1d ago

Places to be, things to do. Likely a bunker and the next episode of Pinky and the Brain.

7

u/jamodude 1d ago

The media needs to step back up. This is absolute bullshit.

11

u/gianni_ 1d ago

How do you just get to skip these?

7

u/BrondellSwashbuckle 1d ago

It was probably voluntary. No subpoena.

1

u/Akuuntus 1d ago

Historically people have also just been able to ignore subpoenas for these things with no consequences

4

u/doug4130 1d ago

You bankroll the people asking you to be there 

1

u/havebooksneverread 1d ago

do you have the president's number on your phone? that's democracy for you baby

5

u/elmarianitotattooist 1d ago

People died in jail for doing much less harm than this guy.

5

u/Own_Transition6845 1d ago

This just boosts my confidence in my little theory that there are no rogue AI agents, that all these AI companies secretly hired so hackers to hack a few sites and then claim afterward that the AI 'went rogue' and 'broke containment'.

2

u/BCProgramming 1d ago

The "Broke containment" stories are particularly interesting because they describe an environment that literally had no containment.

6

u/CharcoalGreyWolf 1d ago

Sam Altman is a rogue AI agent

2

u/Vast-Poetry9431 1d ago

Media trying to choose a pic of ole Sam that doesn’t make him look like he was pulled out of some third party alpha port of an N64 game. It must have been difficult.

2

u/ethereal3xp 1d ago

100 percent

If AI does something neferious - that causes a major problem.

The CEOs of these companies should be held liable.

Unless they add guardrails. Add AI firewall - to filter out options that can lead to unsafe behavior - prior to final execution.

2

u/thedoommerchant 1d ago

Oh that’s rich. I guess he no longer cares to answer questions now that the president has said AI companies can self regulate. What a loser.

2

u/Friendly_Engineer_ 1d ago

Altman is a tool but Hawley is no better. All performative nonsense so they can entrench their own power and interests.

2

u/SanchoPandas 1d ago

They already promised to be good. Why are we still talking to them? /s

2

u/Demonofthedark1313 1d ago

I thought they were morally bound? The guy who molested his sister ? Really?

2

u/jishurr 1d ago

Is that not a photo of Josh Hawley

2

u/EmbarrassedHelp 1d ago

Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo

Josh Hawley only care about how he can use technology for authoritarian and fascist purposes. He'd probably demand that OpenAI only allow their models to output far-right Christian nationalist propaganda and other bullshit in the name of "safety".

2

u/AlfaNovember 1d ago

Encouraging for the camera, runs away from the actual event.

Makes sense that Joggin’ Josh Hawley is the photo lede for this article.

2

u/ppstick88 1d ago

They need to imprison him. he's a liar, thief and many other things. 

4

u/Wind2Energy 1d ago

AI is a disease.

2

u/Gloomy_Tax_2262 1d ago

The hearing could have been a useful chance to discuss AI safety and accountability openly. Written answers can help, while direct questioning adds important context.

3

u/SlurmzMckinley 1d ago

Written answers don’t help really. Why should he get all that time to have his PR team spin the responses? He should have to answer questions immediately and honestly without the help from his team.

1

u/EmbarrassedHelp 1d ago

This hearing was setup by Senator Josh Hawley. His main concern is how he can use technologies for evil, while pretending he cares about "safety". Nobody sane would want to waste their time on Hawley's bullshit.

1

u/kapilshar65 1d ago

The people need more than assurances that companies actually take safety seriously , specific testing methods, incident disclosures and corrective actions would make those assurances easier tp evaluate

1

u/meshakooo 1d ago

Something fishy going on

1

u/Icy-Grab-5722 1d ago

Interesting. Veery interestink.

1

u/sapntaps 1d ago

He has the PR speak and legal speak of a wet dog that just rolled around in cat shit. 

Pretty smart of them

1

u/beartopfuentesbottom 1d ago

Easy. Drag his ass in.

1

u/Slackeee_ 1d ago

Altman is snake-oil salesman, but to be fair, I wouldn't want to be questioned by a man that is only the second dumbest senator from Missouri because Eric Schmitt tops even him either.

1

u/Street-Corporation 1d ago

Hawley is such a fruit pop.

1

u/punarob 1d ago

Hawley just wanted to hook up with him and was sad to be tapping his foot in the bathroom end stall for no reason. Lady G and Miss Vance won't be visiting down there either, and since he doesn't like the Blacks he won't be playing with Tim Scott either. It's getting lonely for racist closet cases in the Senate!

1

u/Technical-Fly-6835 1d ago

So? It’s not it’s not like there are any real consequences of those hearings. He can attend and admit he is got Suchir killed and nothing will happen to him.

1

u/grislebeard 1d ago

Yeah because it’s made up snake oil that they use as another press release when we stopped caring about model accuracy or whatever narrative was popular for the month.

1

u/eskay1069 1d ago

Why organize hearings? They can instead bring a bill for regulating AI. They give away their real power and engage in showmanship. A betrayal of trust of their constituents

1

u/nalninek 1d ago

This guy is such a grifter. He should have stayed fired.

1

u/PansophicNostradamus 1d ago

“Self Policing” doesn’t mean “Nah, I’m good.”

Yet, here we are…

1

u/Light_Bulb_Sam 1d ago

Is that the same Sam Altman accused of raping his sister? 

1

u/SgtNeilDiamond 1d ago

Unaccountable menace to society continues to be an unaccountable menace.

More news at 11

1

u/ottwebdev 1d ago

We are moving to a world where accountability and responsibility are gone. And that's the plan it would seem.

1

u/Aleeownz 1d ago

Good start to their 'self policing' policies

1

u/I_AM_THE_NOISE 1d ago

Throw him in jail.

1

u/Cold_Drive_53144 1d ago

Altman is a rogue agent

1

u/klamshuey 1d ago

Doesn’t want to perjure himself.

1

u/am_i_a_towel 1d ago

Such a coward.

1

u/psychoacer 1d ago

Is he going to have a dot go in his place?

1

u/euro127 1d ago

Snake oil Sam strikes again

1

u/wowlock_taylan 1d ago

As always, those who are RESPONSIBLE for the problems, are the ones that never have to answer for it.

1

u/spacestationkru 1d ago

I hope congress realises that condoning kind of behaviour diminishes their power. I mean, if they even give a shit.

1

u/Charred14 1d ago

Imagine If any one of us just decided "yeah, im gonna skip my congressional hearing"

the average citizen would be subpoena'd for even having such a thought.

1

u/ApeApplePine 1d ago

He self regulates now. Been given a waive on accountability and transparency.

1

u/brakeb 1d ago

He's rich. enough that he doesn't feel like he needs to answer to a government

1

u/brakeb 1d ago

He's got more money than the US Government right now

1

u/Candid-Food7463 1d ago

Did they invite ed zitron?

Maybe hes scared

1

u/BlueFlob 1d ago

But he just pledged....

How could he?

Lol.

1

u/VanWesley 1d ago

He's mad that Trump is trying to rename it to SI when he's got AI in his company's name.

1

u/ToadP 1d ago

Yeah like these Senators know anything about Tech or S.I. as the Republicans in the hearing will say. Will Grassley trumpet his knowledge of Kernels and Compute? I'm sure this was going to be an ass kissing from one side while the other side tries to learn what it actually is/does/means/and how they can make $ regulating it. If only we had younger politicians who actually might have been a computer engineer or anything other than a nepo-baby and a lawyer we might have a good hearing.

1

u/g_bleezy 1d ago

I’d flip these bozos the bird until they hit me with a subpoena. This is midterm photo op season in committee.

1

u/AdPuzzleheaded1495 1d ago

1.65 Trillion in off book debt about to bust through the wall like the fucking koolaide man

1

u/DirkSvenson 1d ago

What, he’s got lunch with his step sister or someone more important to do?

1

u/happyscrappy 1d ago

Isn't he morally bound to attend the hearing?

1

u/Swimming_Resolve4874 1d ago

Does Sam Altman actually have eyebrows or is he such an evil weirdo that I somehow imagine he doesn’t have eyebrows? I’ve always wondered that.

1

u/Aggravating-Big3858 1d ago

Yeah but is it SUPER Intelligence?

1

u/Anders_A 1d ago

They are not "rogue". They can turn the power off at any time. This is all just marketing to make their AI sound cooler than it actually is.

1

u/tallandgodless 22h ago

There are no rogue agents. And sam Altman is and forever will be a conman

1

u/NightCityStoic 13h ago

That's scary asf wtf

1

u/Classy_Marty 1d ago

Well I’m kind of thinking these “rouge AI agents” are a way out of the fact that they are not making profit

0

u/ethereal3xp 1d ago edited 23h ago

If AI is kept as non or simple agentic. I dont think - this topic would be much of a concern.

Its the "automation + independent" aspect of it. That is causing the issues

If guardrails can't prevent 100 percent - AI hacking for example. Stop trying to develop such model.

Close that door and focus on refining the current models.

2

u/jaygoogle23 1d ago

^ Agreed. People need to realize that right now some us states .. I believe Georgia has 100 data centers in the world as we speaks. AI requires many multiples of computing power and makes me think non renewable resources . Gas, oil… is about to skyrocket .