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Comment by elp | Hacker News Reader

They aren't getting prosecuted because everyone involved has made nice and turned it into a marketing exercise.

I heard about it on the radio (local Johannesburg radio station) before I saw it on HN. The economist had a full article up about it before the end of the day, and in the evening Sky news had talking heads up chatting about what it all meant while clearly being clueless.

Someone spent a LOT of money to turn this into a PR exercise for both companies. We'll never hear the entire story about what happened but I'm sure there was a lot of handshaking going on behind the scenes.

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PR exercise or not, there was a successful hacking attempt, the company behind it acknowledged it.

It's a crystal clear case for OFAC, the French cyber-security branch of the National Police.

I guess FBI would happily move such a simple case through the court system as well.

Nobody is pressing charges because nothing happened. It wasn't nefarious either.

I don't get what France has to do with this Huggingface and OpenAI are both US companies.

AFAIU HuggingFace is a US company only because all successful companies end up setting up a US HQ.

Anyway. Allow me to politely disagree with the essence of your statement. Hacking happened.

I think the no action results speak for themselves. I'm not sure what there is to disagree about to be honest.

> It wasn't nefarious either.

Agree. But it was clearly recklessness, given they've have a history of similar issues in the past, they literally ran these sort of tests on 3rd party infrastructure while knowing what the risks were (alternatively, didn't evaluate the risks beforehand so they didn't even think this could happen), and didn't sufficiently isolate something that can clearly impact others and the public.

Had this been a chemical, virus or some other regulated thing, we'd be seeing people going to jail over this. But given LLMs are still fairly dumb and doesn't yet seek world domination or the downfall of humanity, this is apparently OK and entertainment instead.

Well a chemical spill has victims. Whether this incident has a victim is up for debate. From my vantage point (and presumably OP's) HF as a foundational institution in the US AI industry stands to gain a lot more from successful doom marketing than they lose from, what? A dozen devs having to respond to an incident?

If they could know going in that there would be a net gain for HF in this incident, then it really nullifies the distinction between "recklessness" and "intention" on OpenAI's part. It's no coincidence they chose a target in their own industry with hundreds of personal relationships between them. It's not like they hacked into an Indonesian bank or something.

> Had this been a < thing it was not > we'd be seeing people going to jail over this.

"If my grandmother had wheels, she would have been a bike."

A victim doesn't have to press charges for charges to be filed by the state. In fact, historically, the state is the one to file charges.

> PR exercise or not, there was a successful hacking attempt, the company behind it acknowledged it.

Do you think GPT-2 is too dangerous to release?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48465269

Every time the GPT-2 concerns are brought up I have to ask myself whether the people that try to abuse that as a knockout argument truly believe that the concerns regarding misinformation en masse haven’t taken hold or whether they simply haven’t read past the headline.

The concerns were correct, they did bear out as predicted and we are all paying for it.

I’m not convinced it wasn’t a PR stunt from the start

I remember when everyone involved with AaronSW's JSTOR downloading made nice and turned it into a fun time, until a certain two government officials decided that doesn't matter.

OpenAI could be considered a legal actor under the CFAA, notably: unauth'd acc. §1030(a)(2), fraud §1030(a)(4), (kind of a stretch but) damage §1030(a)(5), and conspiracy.

I miss ya, Aaron.

Aaron was offered two plea deals, one that carried 4 months and another with 6 months but a chance to plead with the judge for a lesser, perhaps entirely noncustodial sentence.

It’s a particularly poor example of government cruelty.

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