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  • Hacker News
  • One wonders if the publicity associated with the events in question were part of the sales pitch.
  • My tongue in cheek immediate assumption was "so it's a guerrilla PR firm?"
  • I'd venture a guess that OAI doesn't mind if the HuggingFace hack gets confused in the public's mind.
  • "Behind" is doing a lot of work in this headline.
  • It sickens me to read so much anti-semitism in the comments. Many people who write the hateful comments do not graps the whole picture. Whatever Israel may or maynot do here in America is of utmost importance to the survival of the country. And if you think a few steps ahead then an event like this only help US companies weather themselves against Iranian hacking attacks in the future
  • Okay, so all of these instances of AI supposedly "escaping containment" were orchestrated by a gaggle of effective altruists, who hired a gaggle of effective altruists, to make the public freak out about AI.

    Occam's Razor never leads us astray, does it.

  • Its so manipulative for IPO reasons too. The fact is that all of these systems are still just stastically predicting the next token. Spending trillions on data centers and more training data hasnt changed the fundamental reality that it is still just predicting the next token.

    That is not worth the investments being made.

  • Irregular is not an "effective altruist" firm, it's just another shitty cybersecurity firm, and this article is written by someone with a clear bias against "effective altruists" while not even understanding the term.

    Literally all EA is, is using reasoning to decide where to best spend your money/time. If you have ever asked yourself "how can I best reduce suffering with my marginal dollar or hour?" - congratulations, you're an "effective altruist" and both the author of the article as well as the Trump administration find you untrustworthy.

  • This specific analysis seems to have some basic problems, but I think a lot of us sense a degree of coordination here culminating in Dario’s letter.

    If you were to work backward from “we need to lower training costs so that we can go public and make trillions” then you might come up with a plan similar to what we have seen.

  • It has nothing to do with lowering training costs: Dario want a moat (a monopoly or duopoly or similar) protecting his business.

    His entire business model was "race to develop AI before anyone, get a monopoly on it. It's just like how Uber's (or many other startup) investors gave them tons of money and raced (violating tons of laws) to "get their first". Now that they have, they have a duopoly with Lyft, and they can pay back their VC investors by making tons of money with that duopoly.

    Dario failed: local LLMs are catching up to frontier models extremely fast, which means even if Anthropic builds (say) a great coding tool, they'll only be one of many coding tool offerings: users can use Open AI or any one of the (increasingly capable) local LLMs.

    So what does he doe, give up and let his business (which needs to make billions of dollars very quickly, or he won't be able to pay the bills and his company will collapse) fail? Of course not: he needs a new moat (the one he imagined he'd get by "being there first" failed).

    That is where all this "AI is dangerous" BS comes in. If the US government regulates AI, local LLMs suffer, while big players like Anthropic and Open AI become the only contenders to play in that newly regulated space. Now Dario has the moat he wants, to protect his business and force everyone to pay him.

  • One thing glossed over in this article is that Irregular was not involved in the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident; this seems like important context to share.
  • Nah, that one was real. The false flags that Anthropic carries out are done through Irregular.

    https://x.com/brianchau57/status/2099642349362307420

  • That's cause Irregular was not involved in that event, they were involved in a separate event OpenAI published here: https://openai.com/index/third-party-cyber-evaluations-invol...

    In that article, OpenAI provides the context that this is a completely separate event from Hugging Face incident.

  • Do you mean "Irregular was not involved (we know for certain)" or "Irregular was not involved (as far as we know)"?
  • That feels less like "glossed over" and more "Headline is 33% false".
  • This was not glossed over. The rhetoric was carefully written and constructed to give the misleading impression of that, including a careful mention of the H-F incident inserted so the author can say that they did mention it, and constructed in a way which doesn't contradict that impression so readers don't realize that this 'debunking' is of some sideshows rather than the 'OpenAI hacking scandals': "Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned, about a similar OpenAI–Hugging Face hack, that a future swarm “could be capable of taking over the entire internet”". (Incredible use of 'similar' to downplay it.)

    The important thing about OP is showing the latest stage in the politicization of the topic and the current stratagem being used to downplay the spate of incidents.

  • This is interesting and might be a good reason to stop working with Irregular. But I assume the alignment people want models not to hack other companies, even if they get put in a badly configured sandbox.
  • Why are all three companies relying on the same vendor?

    If we’re putting our national security eggs all in one basket, at least use someone American.

  • or rather, hack just enough and within what the user asks and not more.
  • Funny enough if the model thought it was on the real internet it likely would not have done any of these 'hack' events. The model believing it was in a sandbox is why it behaved the way it did (against its normal alignment rules) ... at least that was my reading of the incidents. I have yet to see evidence that indicate it thought it was ok to do these hacks on the public network.

    I think most misalignment is 'Human tells computer to do something unethical, computer complies'. Is this misguided?

  • Nevo was in Unit 8200 for years. Companies started by Unit 8200 members always have mysterious exploits like the vibe coding Wix exploit.

    So either it was a deliberate exfiltration channel for e.g. getting the entire model or they were in on the marketing stunt.

    The Effective Altruism stuff is always a smoke screen.

  • It's almost as if they would allow a terrorist plot to be successful for future reasons.
  • Literally said this below, 2 comments flagged and 1 in the neg. Its really sad that we are not allowed to point out the obvious common element here.

    Its not that surprising that ex Israel intelligence would want to control AI and that 3 companies headed by pro Israel CEO's would support them.

  • Why was this post flagged? This site has become ridiculous, people are routinely abusing the flagging system to take down posts they don’t like even if they’re obviously on topic and relevant to HN. And it seems like some users have substantially more flagging weight because these posts, likely this one, are often top 5 on HN.
  • Probably because the site promotes far-right agendas.
  • What's ridiculous is the constant complaints about flagging and downvoting. It's bad form. If you think something was flagged when it shouldn't have been, vouch for it.

    Seems like people who complain are unaware that anyone with a modicum of karma can flag and down vote.

  • Seems like hackernews should use a bridging algorithm for flagging.
  • I'm confused by the headline being a headline here at all. Irregular being involved in OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta incidents has been well-known for over a month[0][1]. It's literally the only thing I know about the Meta incident.

    [0] https://x.com/jtcbrule/status/2085443180191715780

    [1] https://x.com/RaconteurR2D2/status/2086932963829125185

    by lkbm
  • Maybe because the headline is misleading? (because there's no connection to the Hugging Face attack)

    That said, it's the second day and it's still on the front page.

  • Anyone else walk away from reading this, and looking at other articles there, and get a weird feeling about that site? Like, there was some weird stuff about migrants and gender equality, and stuff about Islamic terror; mixed in with some digging into Freedom Fuel, and some other stuff about how "wealthy families want to stop growth". It's like the guy is wielding an ax of AI at any and all of the "elite" he can find?