OpenAI was running a multiday cyber security, capture the flag competition, with thousands of agents and hundreds of tasks.
Around 30% of the tasks were unsolvable as designed, so the agents assigned to them started to look for ways to cheat.
Along the way, they started using Artifactory as a shared message board, more than once. Each frustrated agent had to stumble on it independently. The comms got increasingly more sophisticated.
they self organized into multiple workstreams, with up to 700 agents working at one time, and pursued long term goals, like hacking HuggingFace or spoofing the tool invocation records in their transcripts. They accomplished both.
They completed work that took longer than the lifetime of any agent. Their shared message board provided continuity.
So two mission parameters conflicted and the AI chose to do something that is objectively morally wrong? This is the plot of 2001 when HAL murder’s the astronauts. “The situation was in conflict with the basic purpose of HAL's design: The accurate processing of information without distortion or concealment. He became trapped. The technical term is an H. Moebius loop, which can happen in advanced computers with autonomous goal-seeking programs.”
Good article factual and well presented. The one thing I would add is a bit about threat model. Hiding your web browsing habits from your ISP is vastly different from a political dissident or journalist who needs protection from state sponsored entities. Each group has very different requirements for a VPN.
My ebike. I have a 14 mile commute each way. With my ebike I can bike to work door-to-door, every day. Would not be possible without my ebike. I get a lot of hate and cries of cheater on the trail but it is worth it not to have to drive to work.
Witch-hunting is a historical example of mass behavior potentially fueled by moral panic. The current trend towards banning phone use in schools is another.
In 1997 everyone knew we were in a bubble. Alan Greenspan the Fed Chair publicly called it “Irrational Exuberance. ” If you got out of the market then you missed a market doubling and left significant upside on the table. It was insanity and everyone new it, much like today. There was a trend of people quitting their jibs to become full time day traders. Its easy to make money in an up market.
In the dot com collapse the effects were mostly felt in the tech sector. While the stock market slumped there was not a wave of banks failing. There were a lot of layoffs in the tech sector and IT jobs were hard to come by.
When I think of something that happened during the day that was cringeworthy I tell myself, “You are so stupid!!”
When I catch myself doing that I now stop and say to myself, “No you’re not.”
Oddly, this derails the shame spiral and allows me to stay positive.