Hacker News Reader

Comment by frotaur | Hacker News Reader

The huggingface incident was reviewed by independent researchers, which explicitely declined any payment from OpenAI tonpreserve their integrity. They work for non-profits concerned with AI safety.

They claim that what happened was very much not because they were 'carefully engineered and instructed to do those things'.

Similarly, some wikis which were hijacked by agent to be used as messageboard were actually not disclosed by OpenAI (probably trying to conceal, as website showed likely activity from OpenAI researchers visiting the site after the incident) and discovered independently.

I don't know how you can claim that this was still on purpose by OpenAI as some sort of publicity stunt.

View on HN

I think most people are insinuating negligence rather malace..

> ...reviewed by independent researchers...

Why would a company with more capital than God bring in three randos if there was any chance evidence of their culpability could be found?

That entire thing reads like a very controlled PR stunt, and I do not believe any further conclusions can be drawn from it.

What facts would lead you to revise your conclusion?

The METR report included 0 technical details. For example, they did not include: 1. were the agents running on bare metal/docker/VM? 1. were the agents in a VPN? 1. how many TCP/IP requests were made? from what IPs? 1. how many tokens were consumed in the process? (this was explicitly censored)

A proper analysis would include this and MUCH more technical detail so that other AI researchers could actually understand the setup and how safe it was in principle.

The data to be open, in my case.

The "independent" METR that is composed by... Checks notes... Previously employees from the top labs.

Also, the METR report that was one big AI analysis itself - quote from the research:

>Our subjective impressions are likely colored by analysis agents’ biases. Throughout this report, we describe a number of anecdotes of agent behavior that were compiled and summarized by analysis agents, where we were not able to read the transcript deeply enough to manually verify what occurred. We found that GPT-5.6 Sol would often uncritically adopt the perspective of the agent in the transcript it was reviewing

My conclusion is that the investigation was a PR farce. Or "ethics washing" as the article someone else put it here: https://andrewwu.substack.com/p/the-slop-vestigation-and-eth... .

The METR report itself appears to be screaming this at the reader through subtext. They played the only part they could, but did it with a nod and a wink; "Yeah, we know. Also know, yeah. Uh, yep."

I happen to agree with the article's conclusion that what is needed is true, unfettered independent investigation through perhaps a lawsuit or government action.

There is something extra to this. The fact that a lot of people in the AI world suffer from psychosis. They can sincerely believe that they are building God and lie about it's capabilities for their investors at the same time.

I don’t know enough people deep inside the technical roles at the labs to make a judgement. But are you proposing that we should trust randos online when they tell us “exactly what’s going on here” instead of the researchers most knowledgeable on the topic who contributed to building the tools we are talking about?

Or am I misunderstanding something?

We should trust NO ONE, unless we understand the "why" behind what they say.

It's like saying "politicians deal with politics all time, why not trust them on politics?", well, because when you search the "whys", you find they have good reason to lie.

I 100% trust more the opinion of a rando online if it's well put rather than any "trust me bro" of the most knowledgeable person of a particular subject, especially if the knowledgeable person has huge investments on the subject...

AI bros have repeatedly cheated, lied, stolen, lobbied and any other word with a negative connotation you can think of, and a pattern emerges out of this.

Isn't the guy that started METR an ex-OAI employee? They're all from the same lesswrong circle at the very least, most of them have legitimate AI psychosis where they think they're bringing up their new machine God.

>was reviewed by independent researchers

That called it a slopvestigation due to how much they had to rely on LLMs for the whole thing

https://andrewwu.substack.com/p/the-slop-vestigation-and-eth...

Edit: Does everybody else get no results when searching for ‘slopvestigation’ on here? I know for a fact that I read a long thread where it was used repeatedly here not too long ago

Isn’t the use of LLMs to unwind the events evidence of the scope/breadth, and a testament to the complexity and uniqueness of what happened?

Or you think some human or team of humans could have manually parsed some logs to provide an unsloppy analysis?

> Or you think some human or team of humans could have manually parsed some logs to provide an unsloppy analysis?

When we have an error or issue in the $WORK codebase on LIVE/PROD, that's precisely what we do. We sit down, analyze the logs for our services over the relevant date ranges and try to piece together exactly what happened and why. We have a huge number of logs too, but thanks to the magic of proper SWE (which you'd think OAI would have with their magic AIs) we've managed to partition our observability tooling so that you can digest only what you need.

That's basically how any serious organization does things, instead of just throwing a non-deterministic black box at the problem. Especially because logs are by their very nature noisy, and they will saturate any model's context window very quickly leading to massive hallucinations and what ultimately amounts to making shit up that isn't anywhere in the logs (ask me how I know)

> Or you think some human or team of humans could have manually parsed some logs to provide an unsloppy analysis?

Do you think the only thing a person can do on the computer is use a chat bot?

Well as a programmer who doesn’t really use them, no.

'Slopping': when you have to buy something you know is poor quality, but if it works...

doesn't show up for me either

The models were deployed by responsible humans in such a way that they were capable of performing this hack. It’s not that deep

Source?

https://metr.org/blog/2026-08-26-openai-hugging-face-inciden...

Easy to find yourself in literally 15 seconds.

Because they have a need to believe they're smarter than everyone else in the room, and that the world must be orchestrated, this can't all be random chance.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com