First we learned about the HuggingFace incident. They gave us a postmortem, but it was highly incomplete. Even the accompanying holy s*** METR investigation and postmortem was localized and incomplete.
Then there were some other incidents involving some Wikis as message boards.
Then there were some additional incidents.
Then there was that time they got into Australian Medicare data.
Then OpenAI dropped news on a Friday afternoon that they were making their way through a pile of various incidents and notifying the targets, but they said remarkably little in the way of new details.
There was a report from a startup called Parse diving into the details of exactly how the OpenAI models pulled off parts of the HuggingFace attack, involving creating almost a million URLs and other tricks to get around the extremely narrow nature of their internet access.
Then Madison Mills reported in Axios that we can raise the stakes, as OpenAI and Anthropic are collectively probing tens of thousands of security incidents.
Remember Jensen Huang’s ‘I know they know how to fix it’ about OpenAI from last week? Wow, did that not age well.
Someone might need to be liable for all this.
Oh, and there was another buried lede. On September 20th there was another sandbox escape by OpenAI’s latest most advanced model, which is once again paused until they can fix the situation. The official announcement when they shared this was sufficiently buried that Tomek had to call it ‘one news form today that’s easy to miss.’
OpenAI did some highly negligent things, to say the least, that led up to and enabled the HuggingFace Incident and related problems.
Since then, now that they’ve realized What Happened, OpenAI has been seemingly much better about taking responsible internal actions. They’re pausing in the wake of incidents, strengthening security and alignment and oversight efforts, responding much faster and generally taking things seriously.
They’ve also made a Heel Face Turn in their communications and high level orientation, endorsing the need to pace the frontier, calling for regulation and pledging to implement embedded evaluators. They’ve allowed their employees, including the ones who haven’t quit, to be remarkably loud.
They are still slow walking disclosures about all the incidents where their models have been hacking and otherwise messing in places they should not have been, partly because there were so many they can’t sort through them all, and deferring to targets to determine whether to disclose. All these disclosures this time around were buried in various Friday afternoon announcements.
Table of Contents
- Hugging Other Faces.
- A Wants-You-To-Know Basis.
- Parsing the Face.
- Sheepishly the Member of Technical Staff Sets the ‘Days Without a Research Model Escaping its Sandbox’ Sign Back to Zero.
- The Attempt is the First Failure.
- Stop, Hammertime.
- Whacking the Mole.
- Self-Replicating Prompt Injections.
- Levels of Friction.
- People Care About Private Data Violations Curiously Strongly.
- Alternate Universes.
- The Correct Response To People Still Calling This a Marketing Stunt or a Regulatory Capture Scheme.
- A Question of Liability.
- Keep Summer Safe.
- N Boats and Several Helicopters.
- Alert the Media.
Hugging Other Faces
The news drops started with OpenAI coming back, at a time always picked to bury stories, with more information on What Happened as their investigations continue.
At first, this looked like slow walking of the situation, but did not look like it was a big change from our default assumption of ‘it’s worse than you know.’
The news drops started with OpenAI coming back, at a time always picked to bury stories, with more information on What Happened as their investigations continue.
At first, this looked like slow walking of the situation, but did not look like it was a big change from our default assumption of ‘it’s worse than you know.’
by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWAV | Read more:
