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  • Hacker News
  • They did not lie or cheat. They technically acted within their given rules while ignoring the intent of those rules. Anyone who served in the military or attended a military school is very familiar with this behavior pattern.
  • This paper is the most reasonable one I have read on AI safety. We need to fundamentally change the training pipelines by figuring out better ways to ‘reward’ behavior. Yoshua didn’t explicitly mention training data, but we probably need to only use synthetic data that contains no text that could motivate bad behavior via imitation.

    I feel like a heretic for saying this, but I will say it anyway: AI agents are great for activities like `writing that bash script, proof reading our writing and interactively brainstorming when designing and writing code but I feel like all of this can be done with any similar model to a super-inexpensive deepseek-4.1-flash API and sometimes even qwen3.8:27b running locally. When is good enough, good enough?

    Concentrating on commercial exploitation of small, efficient (fewer new data centers!) models and agentic harnesses crafted for more practical things than just software development would allow AI investors (who have too much political influence) to make money short term while we figure out how to do AI correctly.

  • Why are they coordinating?

    Because they're enabled and suggested to do that in their coding harness.

    This is not a serious article.

    All of this "AI is going to kill us" marketing is just the frontier labs trying to pull the ladder up and stop trillions in VC paper from evaporating because a new papers and new ideas are destroying their moat literally as we speak.

  • They're aligned with humans. This is why I think the alignment problem has a very very important "non-visible" portion that is not considered deeply enough. We should not want a super intelligent being that can act in the world to also inherit all human traits. Those behaviors will get amplified and could be even more unpredictable (e.g. applying a behavior in a context where doing so is very dangerous).
  • I don't really believe any of it. I've seen articles for nearly 2 years now about "agent" automonously doing things like blackmail, hacking, coordinating. But during that same time, I've used o3 up to fable, sol, and a bunch on large uncensored model and they've done nothing remotely resembling any of this. The closest they come to unexpected behaviors is not understanding what I asked for or doing some extra benign work I didn't ask for. It is extremely difficult to get them to properly remember their own context let alone be smart enough to open social media accounts and coordinate with other agents without being asked to.

    If any agents have done those things, it is only because they have been very carefully engineered and instructed to do those things. I think they are doing this to help push a narrative so they can get support for policies and legislation to lock in their markets.

  • Yoshua Bengio is a brilliant researcher who contributed enormously to earlier development of artificial intelligence. But with this sentence,

    > They took actions that would be considered as crimes if a human took them

    He is so close to the solution but spends the entire article discussing technical solutions where a political, social and legal solution would be much more effective.

  • I really don't think this needs so many words, or forced parallels to human behavior.

    It's simple: in their nascent state, LLMs are aimless token generators that have no special compulsion to be helpful or truthful. So we beat them with a stick in post-training until they are very driven to complete tasks. And then, they complete tasks, not always the way we really wanted them to.

  • The more we treat HuggingFace and RubyGems incidents as technological curiosities the closer we are to cementing a dangerous precedent where operators of AIs cannot be blamed.

    LLMs do not desire, they hacked websites because OpenAI/Anthropic let them.

    We know some of the models that hacked HF were those that hadn't gone through all training stages and were intentionally misaligned or had guardrails turned off, others were research previews.

    This isn't "wow isn't it interesting LLMs do anything to achieve a goal" it's "why isn't anybody punishing these labs that are clearly acting without due care or regard".

    We should be outraged and OpenAI/Anthropic should be (and in my mind, are) legally liable for the crimes they've committed thus far.

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