I agree with this almost completely (especially about sane companies, which I think we can all agree they are not), but I think it's important to separate the notion that these tools are potentially dangerous from the behaviour of the CEOs. The executives are there to make as much money as possible, that is all they care about. It's the researchers who are playing around with these things that are causing damage with them (aside from the damages from the data centers themselves, of course). They need to be better than this. It's not enough to blame senior leaders in this case, since they are clearly problematic. The junior staff share responsibility now too.
> OpenAI and Anthropic have way too many senior staff on staff to be unaware of this
Anthropic, yes. For OpenAI, not in the way you might think. Most senior staff are research scientists who have likely not even thought about sandboxing and cybersecurity in their lives. They outcompete the rest. That's why so many of their "safety" staff left for Anthropic; the culture at OpenAI has never cared for these sorts of topics.
It seems like you're trying to claim that -unlike OpenAI- Anthropic has a robust culture of security and safety and would never do something so negligent as test a highly-capable computer-attacking tool that has been instructed to attack computers in a test environment that's connected to the Internet.
I stand by my claim that the conduct of the major LLM manufacturers does not look at all like what you'd expect from people who believe that they're working on something so dangerous that it could plausibly wipe out all of humanity.
[0] I refer you back my first post about how one sets up a test environment when one actually wants to ensure that a machine doesn't connect to the Internet. [1] Just like OpenAI, Anthropic did not do that.
No, I'm not implying that. I'm suggesting that many more of these issues are likely to come from OpenAI due to their culture (not that that is okay). Anthropic has no excuse, I know they know better. One might argue that they were initially negligent because they didn't really believe it would do anything like this. But having further incidents is pure negligence at best.
> I'm suggesting that many more of these issues are likely to come from OpenAI due to their culture...
Both companies have been equally reckless with the tools they sell and the tools they test. Your warm and fuzzy feelings that come from speaking with a handful of line workers at Anthropic don't change that fact.
I've spoken to researchers at both OpenAI and Anthropic. They are not "line workers". The researchers at Anthropic are more senior, that's all. None of the folks I met, from either institution, would likely know how to properly airgap their runs. I don't, I'm a maths geek, not an engineer. Honestly I wouldn't even have thought to look it up. Maybe that's a hiring problem.
Both companies have not been equally reckless, but they have both been reckless to varying degrees. I don't have any personal stakes in either company, and would prefer both to go bankrupt if I'm being honest, as I despise their behind-closed-doors attitude.
Other than that, do you think AISI is reckless too?
In the "management" vs "line worker" split, they absolutely are. You appear to think that line workers cannot be highly skilled, which is absolutely not true.
Anyway, I'm super done here. Hopefully one day you'll learn to judge a company based on its actions [0], rather than what it claims about itself or how you feel about those of its employees that you've met.
[0] ...especially when considered in light of standard practice for companies in similar industries...
> OpenAI and Anthropic have way too many senior staff on staff to be unaware of this
Anthropic, yes. For OpenAI, not in the way you might think. Most senior staff are research scientists who have likely not even thought about sandboxing and cybersecurity in their lives. They outcompete the rest. That's why so many of their "safety" staff left for Anthropic; the culture at OpenAI has never cared for these sorts of topics.