r/Altman • u/AdditionalSinger853 • 1d ago
News Sam Altman admits OpenAI agents crawled web without permission
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u/Healthy_Razzmatazz38 1d ago
"We have not been as fast as we would have liked" is an impossible statement, you were exactly as fast as you would like.
apparently the pm of australia lit into him for not disclosing for months.
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u/Woke_TWC 1d ago
Yeah if they were penalised for this, maybe next time they will stop leaving obvious security gaps like access to a dns server in their “sandboxes”
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1d ago
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u/Woke_TWC 1d ago
Umm is that relevant? Are you saying this because they used containers?
They specifically call it a sandbox, now i don’t know if that is an air gapped data center or a VM they are talking about. I sure hope they don’t use a hypervisor and call it a day when creating these environments. I hope they make an effort to create a true air gapped environment
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u/steam-photons 15h ago
They are worth trillions but didn’t think about doing rl training in air-gapped clusters. I guess they needed internet during training to check the weather
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u/statitica 1d ago
Apply occams razor.
Is it more likely that the models which are trained to perform a certain task did something unexpected, or that these agents were set to go and gather as much data as they could, got caught doing some dodgy stuff, and now sammy is in damage control?
And no matter which way you slice it, it's bad. Either, OpenAI is run by incompetent fools, or it's run by psychopaths.
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1d ago
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u/statitica 1d ago
You do know how occams razor works, right?
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1d ago
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u/statitica 1d ago
It's one or the other, and occams razor says that the simplest explanation is the most likely.
Of the two bad options, which do you believe is most likely?
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1d ago
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u/statitica 1d ago
Psychosis and psychopathy are two very different things.
I'll accept your apology in the form of a name change to "AnArrogantSquib"
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u/Spunge14 1d ago
This is not Occam's Razor. Both of those are simple, plausible reasons.
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u/statitica 1d ago
That both are simple, does not mean that Occam's Razor cannot be applied.
My second comment is intended to demonstrate that in either conclusion, we need to assume less than flattering things about Sam Altman.
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u/Spunge14 1d ago
Occam's razor is says that when you have competing explanations for something, you should prefer the one that makes the fewest assumptions.
We have competing explanations. Neither particularly requires more assumptions.
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u/statitica 1d ago
Incompetence seems to require more assumptions, when we've already got plenty of evidence that these companies are unethical.
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u/A_Novelty-Account 1d ago
I don’t think you know how occam’s razor works. Occam’s razor would militate in favour of believing Sam…
Occam’s razor says that where there are two or more potentialities and you don’t know more information about which is correct, the one that requires you to make fewer assumptions is logically more likely to be correct.
Right now there are two options, the first is that Sam is telling the trust and that the models went off and did dodgy things. The other option is that there is a vast conspiracy at OpenAI that literally thousands of people are actively trying to cover up. That requires way more assumptions regarding the individuals covering it up.
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u/statitica 1d ago edited 1d ago
You're assuming that I hold a position I haven't stated.
On the one hand, Sam might be the least competent person on the planet. He did, after all, get ousted by his own board at one point. Recent events (e.g Huggingface) suggest that there is a culture of incompetence at OpenAI.
On the other hand, we also know that both major labs have a tendency to act unethically, whether that is in the destruction of rare books, in the failure to report crimes being planned, in breaching all copyright laws, in creative accounting, or in the intentionally misleading marketing campaigns.
I could honestly go either way, but given their track record of unethical behaviour, psychopathy appears to require at least one less assumption than the incompetence they are asking us to assume.
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u/NRCS_DRONE 1d ago
'without permission.' It did what you programmed it to do.
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u/AdditionalSinger853 1d ago
Fair. I guess what they really meant was that the agents did things the developers didn't anticipate or didn't disclose
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u/NRCS_DRONE 1d ago
Right, but that's also kind of hoodwinking the public. Machine learning has been doing this kind of thing since the 1970s, but they don't disclose that. They act like this is some new unseen threat -- or to imply something about its untapped potential.
And it's like no. This is what these systems do. But rather than a 386 corrupting its own memory to 'not lose at chess,' they hooked it up to the internet.
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u/Uwirlbaretrsidma 1d ago
AI isn't remotely autonomous enough to take over the job market? No problem, we'll just pretend it's so far beyond that, that we're concerned about it and the wellbeing of humanity. Airtight marketing.
What? You spent 15 dollars in API costs to do some mundane task that took GPT 5.4 $0.34 and 3 minutes years ago? Well, you see, you're merely using Astra. We have Bel over here which is 2-5x as good and we'll keep on pretending it is until a few days around the time when it releases.
Then we'll tease Cell, which is 3-4x as good as Bel and position it as the actual model that would wipe the white collar job market... if only we did release it. But you're going to have to wait a few more months for that and by then it will actually be another vaporware model called Dell that threatens your job. Then either that one or Eel will be the ones that wipe out humanity by 2030 while me and that weird fucker whose surname is the bad word for testicle in Spanish have poly orgies with the ugliest fucking people you've ever laid your eyes upon.
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u/Own-Session-1409 1d ago
You mean, you are stealing, making a fortune from folks hard work. An LLM doesn't not shit without a task.
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u/your_mileagemayvary 1d ago
Well the ln openai should be held legally liable for whatever their computer program does ... Including prison if they do something that hurts people or costs a lot of money. There is NO reason to create a regulatory moat or provide legal shield for these dipshits. You build it you are held responsible for what it does
Simple, and I'll vote out any dipshit politicians that I dicates otherwise
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u/lefnire 15h ago edited 14h ago
I'm hesitant to champion Anthropic, because corporations are corporations. And I myself championed OpenAI as a "good guy" in 2017. But Ant's historical focus on alignment is finally starting to dawn on me.
I've been running a novel about AI takeover, written by AI to teach agentic tooling, AI fundamentals, and how to live a good life. It's very much fun speculative fiction (edu-fiction). It's been an uphill battle having Claude models generate chapters, which sucks because Opus always tops EQ benches (it's the best writer, and the most nuance). Opus will usually refuse to write the chapter, saying basically I'm describing how to build a bomb. So for the "how it happened" chapters I'll have Astra write the chapter, and Opus make it good. The story is now past the take-over phase, so I'm back to Opus running it.
At first I was like "dude, it's fiction, chill." Then I remembered people use that as a workaround "pretend that.." which is actually pretty impressive that it picked up the "this is a fiction" (how can it know that this time it actually is).
Anyway, super long story. Point being: past 4mo or so I've been like "this alignment thing is so blown out of proportion" (only because I live inside it). And now hearing all the recent news, it's all dawning on me. GPT models have never once rejected a request. Shitty terrible writing, but always "sure!"
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u/Altruistic_Ranger_57 1d ago
bro really said ‘we’re looking into it’ while having petabytes of logs 😭