What this says to me is OpenAI is a bunch of yahoos who don't understand the basic concept of an air gap.
Letting them play on the open internet like this is irresponsible and stupid.
If you want to argue they should test on the internet on others people’s servers, apart from facing the illegality, you should also consider if first testing them in more limited conditions would be a sensible first step.
There are other options here than always forward.
Either they are lying and not that scared of these agents, or they are so stupid that they don't do the one obvious fix.
The negligence in that light is by design and the lying continues to be incentivised.
How disappointing.
While I think incompetence more likely than conspiracy for these particular events, they will be spun as signs of intelligent independent agents and this simply never should have happened if the right controls were in place. That they were not is deeply worrying.
It’s like having water start flooding the street frommmy building; yes the flooding is impacting outside the building but the tap is still very much onsite and clearly there are missing condole as these are not autonomous systems they are running initiated prompts that are coming from inside the building.
You expect them to start hacking ham radio and take over the world that way? Or maybe they’ll use blinkenlights to communicate with non-isolated instances?
An airgap would certainly be a good place to start for agents which display no signs of obeying instructions or respecting guardrails. That OpenAI haven’t done so in testing is astounding and really quite worrying.
And those AI companies also do robotics research, and this is entirely speculation but it'd be on-brand to also have AI watching security cameras, so some blinkenlights communication between AIs may seem like a movie plot, but so does a swarm of AIs collaborating to break out in the first place...