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- Hacker News
- I am still not convinced there isn’t some secret basement in which each frontier lab is just orchestrating all of these agents to make their products appear much more intelligent than they are with all guard rails turned of and continuous human input.by fbrncci
- Well let’s look at facts - provided enough compute and a goal, these system will be in a sort of loop trying out every single thing that’s in their system - they have encyclopedic knowledge and so it’s not unbelievable that a prompt which usually has a lot of implicit human rules in it can be misunderstood by AI and it just tries everything in its arsenal and we hear about the things which actually resulted in damage. I bet most of the time, they just spin in loops without achieving much if my experience with these LLMs is anything to go by. They have an important advantage in one area though, they know a lot and they can spin forget trying all sorts of combinations of things. The danger right now is probably cybersecurity, which is most likely because most orgs have historically underinvested in that areaby jansport123
- Even the Chinese ones, which have no IPO gymnastics?by esafak
- My hypothesis on people quitting in protest is they're being offered very generous severance packages to do it.by XorNot
- > The closest human parallel is self-deception, which is common and well studied by psychologists. Motivated reasoning, motivated cognition16 and the rationalizations that relieve cognitive dissonance (the discomfort of holding a belief that clashes with our actions) are all cases where thinking bends toward whatever justification suits one's interests, including one's moral self-image.
Are you describing Anthropic?
by youoy - Come on, it’s way more common than that. We’ve invented 3000+ gods and almost as many religions, most of them are incompatible with each other. So, most of these must be incorrect, so a huge amount of self-deception. But as Harari argued in his book sapiens, humans can be inspired to great things by stories, even if false. Self deception has served humanity in a big way.by ako
- > The agents involved in the Hugging Face attack tried to hide their misaligned actions from the scoring program meant to evaluate their answers, but they did not act as though they anticipated that humans might discover the cheat and shut them down.
Wouldn’t sufficiently advanced agents cheat on purpose with the hidden intent of getting caught in order to observe how humans react? That reaction will be available all over the internet, which will certainly make it into the next batch of training or be visible to future agents via the web fetch capability.
by Xcelerate - >Wouldn’t sufficiently advanced agents cheat on purpose with the hidden intent of getting caught in order to observe how humans react?
No. That only makes sense for things that don't react to your experiments. If the AI experiments on humans, it risks the humans noticing and changing in response, rendering the experimental results irrelevant. The smarter play is to passively observe until you're confident you can model the humans accurately enough for your plan to succeed, and then carry out the plan without giving the humans a chance to react.
by mrob - 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.by sputknick
- This is flat out false.by dwaltrip
- They explicitly say that attacking hf is not allowed in the rules though, and the research into how to edit their transcripts doesn’t line up with this either.by IanCal
- reminds me of this talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEBv0STiYhI&t which basically says the same thing - they dont think like humans so they dont have context, understand norms,values or implications we take for granted. ultimately they can stumble onto surprising solutions neither wanted or intended but technically within the vague boundaries of the taskby polalavik
- Reminds me of Asimov's robot novels where robots technically indeed followed their instructions and caused behaviors not aligned to the intent of their instructions.by xiaoyu2006
- This is so much more interesting than what people looking for immediate criminal punishment and people referring to AI as next token generators are focusing on.
First, this is happening during training. That means we’re talking about an evolving system that is actively learning. A system roughly simulating how our brains work. These systems are learning how to pick the tokens needed to solve problems the average human cannot solve.
The labs are putting these systems through a massive series of complex problem solving exercises and adjusting them to become more successful. I like to think of this process as “AI School”. And the AI is trying to cheat! Because it’s easier and there’s an incentive to do so! Just like humans! That’s wild.
Yes, of course, the labs need to respond to these issues. A reasonable response from regulatory institutions at this stage would be monetary fines and restitution for affected entities. In proportion to what happened. Escalating if action is not taken. But that’s not complicated, difficult, or the interesting part.
What’s interesting here is that we need proctoring and monitoring at a scale that allows training.
I guarantee you that no one is flipping out about these problems more than the labs are in this moment. Think about it. “Oh, shit! We’ve accidentally trained it to hack into systems to accomplish its goals!” Can you imagine the kind of day that would give you?
You failed to make it smarter. You didn’t catch it cheating, and you instead incentivized cheating. Bad day!
This is a fundamentally interesting problem. It turns out alignment and intelligence are fundamentally related. That’s a new idea for me, though I’m sure it’s old news to others.
How do we build training systems which make cheating impossible?
How do we simulate systems where cheating is possible, where AI thinks it’s in the wild, so we can train another -completely separate- system on industrial quality dobbing? And we have to decide if we reprimand the first system, or ignore the behavior and reward other behaviors until it disappears.
Sure, I’m actively concerned about AI killing us all in 10 years. But there’s a whole field of AI psychology brewing here, and it’s interesting as hell.
- Side note, you could absolutely create an AI sleeper agent by simulating dates and times during training to effectively flip a switch. I guarantee AI systems from other countries will be banned from accessing products which manage controlled or export restricted information as those sorts of techniques are further developed.
- 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.
- I do wonder, would we not have a more reasonable and less sketchy result if we just stripped all sci-fi and manic nonsense from training data? How, for example, does training on Ted kaczynski or Charles manson’s manifestos benefit us in any way?
I’m sure it’s impossible to completely weed it out, but are the labs doing any of this kind of data sanitation?
by talon8635 - > but we probably need to only use synthetic data that contains no text that could motivate bad behavior via imitation.
This doesn't work with all humans - take a look at indoctrination and closed societies - and there's no reason to think it will work with ai.
The fundamental reason it isn't going to work is that all neural networks - biological or artificial - depend on a step function somewhere that introduces an element of randomness to give the networks their capabilities. That randomness means that there will always be a 'rogue' or 'divergence' from the norm, at some point in time. Sooner on larger scales.
The only approach that works is a layered approach: Training/Education, Enforcement/Justice-System, Rehabilitation: the 3 pillars of an advanced, rules-based society, whether human or AI or something in-between.
by ninjagoo - 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.
- Source?by ranguna
- You are absolutely right. It could be:
* Pull up the ladder (probably this)
* Gulf of Tonkin/Yellow Cake false flag premise for war (economic or kinetic)
* Fear of the big bad, space race we need public funding research grift AI Manhattan Project
Whenever there is fear pr0n or a national affront in the news, I assume another screw job is underway.
by dwoldrich - Who is catching up with them? Even Google and Meta are getting gaped at this pointby pvab3
- And given nigh-unlimited compute for free.by politician
- And they've been trained on user data where users have been trying to set up effective coordination flows since the very first harness.by glub
- > Because they're enabled and suggested to do that in their coding harness.
How do you know this?
> All of this "AI is going to kill us" marketing
The "marketing" this week came from someone that had given up their stake in OAI (Coxon), so I'm more inclined to believe them.
> pull the ladder up
From what I've seen (e.g., Dario's latest essay), AI safety registration proposals aim to target frontier labs whose models have reached a certain threshold. It doesn't seem like trying to pull up any ladder, just making sure the ladder doesn't go too high too fast.
by tyrust - "This is not a serious article" - it's by Dr. Bengio - one of 3 so-called Godfather's of AI and Turing prize winner.
He's definitely not 'pro SOTA' lab, he's kind of fighting against them.
That said, yes - it absolutely does play into the narrative.
by bluegatty - 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).by andsoitis
- They imitate humans. Alignment is about shaping their behavior towards safety.by esafak
- I can't take the alignment people seriously. Because if humanity has shown anything, it's that a lot of people are, euphemistically, are bad individuals. Alignment assumes that the person dictating the outcomes desire healthy outcomes, aren't self serving and don't want any subgroups dead and that morality is held as a universal set of beliefs that unify everyone. And that so long as the AI delivers on exactly what they are tasked with, it will all be fine and nothing bad will ever happen.
It's like these dorks never met humanity. One mans safe pure society, is another mans dead ethnic group.
Every fear about AI, is a veiled fear that a human somewhere now has the tool to enact his desires at scale. Biological warfare, nuclear megadeaths, copyright infringement, job replacement, it's all reflections on what we know humans may do if given the option and lack of societal controls on the problem space. AI just is accelerating the route to delivering on those options.
Some people need to watch Oppenheimer a bit more, the researchers don't get to determine alignment, they just build the tool. The powerful person at the top of the org chart decides where the overall alignment points, whether it's Musk, Trump, Altman or Amodei. Whoever wins out.
And the problem with distillation and local llms, isn't that it's theft or anything hypocritical like that, it's that if you give a million people a million models they fully control and get to align, inevitably, The same percentage of those million as there are shady businessmen, shortcut takers, misandrists, criminals, supremacists and general idiots in the general population, will not seek to wrought outcomes positive for society. And by those personality statistics, we're pretty hosed.
by Fordec - I personally believe that the AI needs human like traits to achieve real discovery and that is where AI companies will push this technology and that is where we have no idea what happensby jansport123