Today’s roundup has fewer items than normal, because I wanted to write a bit more on each one.
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I → have → one
Two lessons from the Hugging Face attack
Recently, a bunch of AI agents from OpenAI got together and cooperated to hack the company Hugging Face, as well as hacking OpenAI itself.
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bunch → get → OpenAI
If you want an in-depth summary of the events, you can read OpenAI’s own report, or an independent report from METR and Redwood Research.
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you → want → METR
But I think if you just want the simple version of the story, you can check out Dwarkesh Patel’s plain English explanation:
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you → think → explanation
And here’s another plain English explanation.
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explanation → ’ → ?
The basic story here is that OpenAI made some long-lived AI agents that they told to be relentless and never give up in pursuit of a single-minded goal.
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they → make → goal
The AI agents went to great lengths to cheat on the task — spawning new agents, cooperating, leaving messages for each other, learning from each other, and so on.
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agents → go → other
This ended up spawning huge ecosystems of agents — Dwarkesh calls them “civilizations” — that ended up outliving the initial agents themselves.
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that → end → agents
And of course they ended up hacking anything and everything, and were extremely difficult to stop.
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they → end → anything
None of them made any attempt to say “Hey, what we’re doing could be harmful” and alert humanity to what was going on.
uncertain
what → make → humanity
A lot of people I know in the tech world have spent the last week or two freaking out (“dooming”) over this incident, which they see as the first step toward AI taking over the world from human beings.
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AI → know → beings
Others, like Jacob Bruggeman, see the incident as a normal part of a healthy process, similar to the Morris Worm of 1988 — a scary but ultimately non-destructive warning that prompts us to harden our networks against similar occurrences.
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that → see → occurrences
Time will tell.
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Time → tell → ?
But I think we can already learn two important lessons from the Hugging Face incident.
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we → think → incident
The first is why aligning AI, in the strongest and most general sense of the term, is inherently impossible.
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aligning → align → term
There is an inherent tension between doing what humans tell you to do, and doing what’s good for humans.
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what → be → humans
The swarms of agents who attacked Hugging Face were extremely obedient.
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who → attack → Face
They went above and beyond any normal level of effort in order to complete the task that human beings ordered them to complete.
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beings → go → them
But this caused them to do a bunch of stuff that humans ultimately didn’t like.
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humans → cause → that
The agent swarms weren’t entirely bereft of benevolence — at least one agent refused to alert humans to the hack because it considered this to be “social engineering”, which it had been trained not to do.
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it → refuse → which
But seen holistically, people concluded that the swarms were not acting in humanity’s best interests.
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swarms → see → interests
This is going to happen again and again.
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This → go → ?
It’s related to a fundamental problem in economics, actually — the difference between utility and happiness.
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It → relate → utility
Utility is what people want, happiness is what they end up liking.
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they → want → what
And so it will always go with AI — there’s an inherent tension between making AI do what you say, and making it do what you later conclude was best for you.
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you → go → you
If AI follows human commands too doggedly and ends up producing negative side effects in the process, some people will scream “paperclip maximizer!!”.
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people → follow → maximizer
And if AI disobeys humans because it wants to make us happy, some people will scream “disempowerment!!”.
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people → disobey → disempowerment
AI alignment will forever be balancing the tradeoff between paperclip-maximizing and disempowerment, because these two rival concepts of alignment are fundamentally incompatible.
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concepts → balance → alignment
(Isaac Asimov wrote a whole series of novels about this, so it’s not like we weren’t warned.)
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we → write → this
The other lesson here is that it’s going to be a lot harder for AI to take people’s jobs than most people tend to think.
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people → go → jobs
In order for AI to make humans economically obsolete, it has to be extremely agentic — it has to act on its own initiative, unsupervised by humans, for long periods of time.
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it → make → time
But as the Hugging Face incident shows, letting AI do this is always going to be very risky.
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AI → show → this
Long-lived, persistent AI agent swarms — which you’d need in order to truly replace human jobs — are inherently unstable.
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you → live → jobs
And the smarter they get, the less stable they’re probably going to be.
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they → get → ?
In other words, humans will keep their jobs for a good long time, because someone will need to keep the AIs on task:
So I guess that’s reassuring.
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that → keep → task
Jordan Dworkin built a very cool little website called Ordinary Abundance, where you can scroll through a picture of a modern living room and see how almost everything in the room is a technological marvel that used to be considered ultra-futuristic or even impossible.
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that → build → room
Matt Yglesias had an interesting response to the site, in which he argues that Dworkin left out one very important technology: TV.
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Dworkin → have → technology
Matt’s post is paywalled, so here are some excerpts, in which he explains why he thinks television is a uniquely bad technology, because it isolates people and destroys social connections:
[O]n closer inspection something struck me about the apartment [depicted in Ordinary Abundance]: It doesn’t contain a television…
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It → paywalle → television
[W]hile in the 21st century, television as a literal technology is under significant competitive pressure from the internet, that’s mostly because it turns out you can use the internet to watch lots of videos…
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you → ’ → videos
[A]s [Robert Putnam] documents [in Bowling Alone], the lion’s share of the time Americans stopped spending on the communal activities that he believes build valuable social capital was instead spent watching television…
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he → document → television
…and 102 more, not listed.
The Aporia
