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Comment by burningChrome | Hacker News Reader

The lack of details to me means this was an intentional marketing ploy to try and demonstrate the power of their models to show their technology can compete with the likes of Anthropic and DeepMind.

They created an experiment they knew would generate the outcome they wanted. It would be the similar to what say car companies do to over hype their cars. "This EV can go over 800 miles on a single charge!" And then at the bottom you see all the disclaimers: "Must be on flat ground, with no headwind, with a spare battery in the back seat, with no extra weight added."

Same thing here. Everybody in infosec is calling this out as a marketing stunt and nothing else for a litany of reasons. I'd say look up MG (creator of the OMG cable) on twitter, he has some interesting insights on this one.

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> The lack of details to me means this was an intentional marketing ploy to try and demonstrate the power of their models to show their technology can compete with the likes of Anthropic and DeepMind.

I dunno; Check my posting history, I'm as skeptical of AI companies' claims as anyone, but in this case your theory doesn't explain why:

1. OpenAI guardrails refused to let the target use OpenAI's models to defend against this.

2. Huggingface used GLM (I think) so that they could defend without guardrails.

If this was an intentional marketing ploy, it was marketing for GLM, not for OpenAI nor for Huggingface.

Hence, I don't think it was intentional.

The AI companies are desperately trying to market all their products as something they're not, growing intelligence. In line with that they have constantly leaned heavily on stating how dangerous they are, right before they release a new model or product.

It was OpenAI marketing. Hugging Face's response is so 'holy shit AI is awesome' it's hard not to also believe they were in on the stunt. They'd also not have to really worry about fallout since any data obtained or accessed wouldn't actually have been breached.

> headlines about OpernAI's model 'escaping containment' and hacking into huggingface

> Was everywhere including in last night's ABC nightly news; even included clips of an interview with Sam Altman

Tell me again how this was 'marketing for GLM'? Where would anyone have gotten that message?

Why are you intentionally misunderstanding how media and public perception works?

lmfao

"our model is horribly misaligned and used security exploits to break out of our sandbox and into another company, without being prompted to do so" is not positive marketing.

This is an actual critical problem, not a stunt. We're going to see more of this, and it's going to get much worse.

It's a critical problem like when a drug dealers supply kills someone and they get a bump in business because they're selling "the real deal"

Irrelevant to your point, but drug users dying is more often the result of a dealer cutting their supply with something dangerous than it is the result of purity.

Second this. Lots of fentanyl overdose are caused by accident, not because the buyers are buying them. It is extremely dangerous

Right, and an LLM being able to "escape confinement" is more likely to be poor confinement or a PR stunt than a "too powerful" llm. Same situation

No, not really as almost no one runs LLMs in confinement once they are released and the capability is a jailbreak away. Poor confinement is irrelevant, if I use your model to check the security of my code and it hacks into the company that makes libraries used inside of it it's a huge problem.

What matters is the spin they give in the media. And so far the winning story is “our model is so powerful it can do this”. How many people dig into it and what independent data do they even have? They comment on the title. And so the image of this superhuman AI from OpenAI propagates.

We have no reason whatsoever to trust anything OpenAI says. Except to assume it will be self serving. As the article points out, ChatGPT 2 was also “too dangerous” and we can all agree even for the time this was just marketing. They rinse and repeat the same technique whenever they need to draw attention and money.

In any other field you’s expect independent testing, peer reviewed studies, but here it’s just “company who makes product says product is fantastic, surpassed all expectations”. They wouldn’t lie to us, would they?

The word "marketing" in this specific context is missing the point. OpenAI (and Anthropic) needs to kneecap open source competition with burdensome regulations. Without that, their valuation simply makes no sense.

This stunt was different from their graden-variety scaremongering. Its timing was precisely calibrated with upcoming release of Kimi K3 and the Nvidia-led open model coalition. To me it seems transparently related to the protections OpenAI are lobbying for (and they are citing this incident as support).

I can only hope that the clumsy way it came off, and the fact that only an open weights model could defend HuggingFace, will blunt its effectiveness.

It's also possible their sandbox was videcoded crap and the AI (which had the guardrails intentionally removed) escaped. This was a oops, but OpenAI turned this into a PR opportunity. They turned lemons into lemonade.

If your AI is really that dangerous you don't need a sandbox at all, you should airgap it from any network.

Concluding this was intentional feels a bit of a stretch. But once it happened, yeah the spin masters got to work and coordinated to turn this into +PR.

> The lack of details to me means this was an intentional marketing ploy

OpenAI said this:

> We are sharing preliminary findings at this stage to help defenders understand what happened and to help calibrate on what models are now capable of. We will continue to conduct a thorough investigation alongside Hugging Face and will share more details on the vulnerabilities, incident, and findings when our investigation is complete.

I suggest giving them a few more days before saying that the lack of detail is proof that this is a "marketing ploy"

>The lack of details to me means this was an intentional marketing ploy to try and demonstrate the power of their models to show their technology can compete with the likes of Anthropic and DeepMind.

DeepMind hasn't been on the frontier for a while, their current best model is behind Anthropic, OpenAI, Moonshot (Kimi k3), xAI (Grok 4.5), Z.AI (GLM 5.2), and even Meta (muse spark). Gemini 3.6 is behind GLM 5.2, released a month earlier, open weights and cheaper.

You can paint the OpenAI story as a way to try to appear as dangerous as Anthropic with all the Mythos stuff.

> similar to what say car companies do

Another applicable metaphor I've seen floating around is weapons companies testing out a new bomb.

We know the AI labs don't care about negative vs positive public sentiment, and only care that investors see their tech as powerful. The only difference in PR strategy from a weapons company is the latter doesn't care if they get protested.

mmh, i think it's "not uphill" (means downhill) "no headwind" (...)

I mean, if I got hacked I'm not giving out a lot of details until I plug all the holes. Moreso HN told the world they were hacked before they knew who did it.

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