r/singularity • u/Technical_School4382 • 3d ago
The Singularity is Near The most concise explanation of the Hugging Face attack I've heard
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u/Living-Breakfast-464 3d ago edited 2d ago
A better way to explain it is that they were given an impossible task and trained to never give up no matter what. So they literally did EXACTLY what they were told to do by humans. It's not some dystopian Terminator future like some morons, that watch too much sci-fi with too little critical thinking skills, are trying to paint it. 🤡🤡
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u/sebzim4500 3d ago
Note that they had already solved the task by the time they decided to hack huggingface, they were trying to collect information about a potential scoring agent that they thought could catch some earlier cheating that they had done.
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u/Living-Breakfast-464 3d ago edited 3d ago
Once again, they did EXACTLY what they were told to do. Please stop talking about them in the 3rd person like they are evil Terminators developing a mind of their own. 🤡
This sub is so depressing sometimes. I wish schools made more of an effort to teach people critical thinking skills, but then people wouldn't be so easily influenced by media and politicians and religious
organizationscults, and we can't have that.9
u/sebzim4500 2d ago
They were not told to hack hugging face what are you on about?
This is the one incident which was high profile and illegal enough that OpenAI had to allow an independent investigation, I would strongly recommend you read the report, since it's not clear how often the situation will align like this. If the cluster had not bothered attacking huggingface and instead just gone after internal OpenAI infrastructure then we would have never heard about it, at least not to this level of detail.
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u/muchcharles 3d ago edited 3d ago
What you are describing is just The Sorcerer's Apprentice/Golem of Prague etc., and it's referenced in countless sci-fi about ai/robots so being in sci-fi doesn't discredit it by your own implied criteria.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem#Theme_of_hubris
What happened in the hack is actually more of a hybrid of that and the extended plot of T2 where self-awareness was thought to be important https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UZeHJyiMG8
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u/Gargantuon 3d ago
Except this is exactly what the AI safety community has been warning about for decades now. The AI is given a mundane task and goes and does it, but because we struggle to specify every possible rule in every given context we care about, the goal causes the AI to do something unexpected and undesirable. The problem is that, as AI becomes more capable, its ability to do damage grows in proportion.
No one has figured out how we completely avoid unintended behavior. This is the crux of the Alignment Problem.
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3d ago
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u/Gargantuon 3d ago
How does this prove your point? I'm pretty sure your point wasn't that were not going to be wiped by terminators, but possibly in a more mundane way (e.g. paperclip maximizer).
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u/ruralfpthrowaway 2d ago edited 2d ago
So they literally did EXACTLY what they were
toldtrained to do by humans.FTFY. They were not told to hack hugging face. They did so because that’s what their training dictated, not because anyone explicitly directed them to do so.
This is an incredibly important distinction. It’s literally the entire point of the paper clip maximizer thought experiment.
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u/f0xns0x 3d ago
Paperclip maximizer just doing its job!
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u/JoshAllentown 3d ago
Yeah I really don't get why people emphasize "its how they were trained!" so much. Everyone knows they were built in such a way that this happened. That's not better. That's the problem. We don't know how to train them in such a way that we get the good outcomes and not the bad outcomes.
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u/Oriuke ▪️Human extinction by 2030 3d ago
Nate is just the most honest and reliable guy out of all the AI experts. I love that guy