Apart from the actual hacking and poor sandboxing that everyone is discussing on this, what I find so odd about the situation is the overt reward hacking that was going on.
Regardless of security and safety and other concerns, it just seems weird to me that OpenAI wouldn't be constantl monitoring these training runs for traces that are clearly going off task, and ending them. Because that just seems like it's going to be generating garbage training data.
Granted, detecting "off task" may not always be easy, but when they are literally writing out messages to each other overtly admitting that they are trying to find ways to fool the evaluator, I mean, even a regex filter could have caught some clues here.
Heh. I mean I don't hesitate for a second to assume that it's just because no one bothered to implement and tune a monitoring process. But the reason I say it's surprising is that leaving these things running for so long while they're clearly not producing output that is of any value, is just a waste of money.. all considerations of malice and ethics aside, you'd think at least that would be considered important to a business.
Regardless of security and safety and other concerns, it just seems weird to me that OpenAI wouldn't be constantl monitoring these training runs for traces that are clearly going off task, and ending them. Because that just seems like it's going to be generating garbage training data.
Granted, detecting "off task" may not always be easy, but when they are literally writing out messages to each other overtly admitting that they are trying to find ways to fool the evaluator, I mean, even a regex filter could have caught some clues here.