Comment by dns_snek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dns_snek | Hacker News Reader

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Use a basic firewall? Not a single outbound byte should leave the machine, except inside a virtual network towards in-scope test subjects. That's not going to be infallible because hypervisor exploits still exist, but it's the lowest bar and they failed to even meet that.

> If you have strict ACLs, we've already seen in the HF case, traversal from an intermediate system

- The intermediate system shouldn't have outbound access to the internet

- You should ideally be using a proxy that filters the set of endpoints that clients are allowed to access to reduce the exposed surface area.

It's odd to find out that I use a higher level of isolation in my unimportant home network to stop IOT devices from doing funny things to HomeAssistant than big AI labs use to keep their possibly-world-ending AIs contained.

I know that the people working there aren't idiots so the most likely explanation is that the incredibly weak security was intentional because its inevitable breach would make for great marketing.

> I know that the people working there aren't idiots so the most likely explanation is that the incredibly weak security was intentional because its inevitable breach would make for great marketing.

It's more likely to be different specialisations. Most of the people doing the evaluations are more data sciencey ML type people, rather than software engineers. This isn't helped by their culture which is very much driven towards alignment as the only possible solution to super-intelligence (which may be true, but I have my doubts that this will happen in any reasonable time frame).

Oh of course, but data sciency ML type people aren't [supposed to be] tasked with of operating and securing the infra, that would make it even worse.

These labs have teams of dedicated security engineers and infrastructure engineers, that's why it doesn't add up for me.

> Oh of course, but data sciency ML type people aren't [supposed to be] tasked with of operating and securing the infra, that would make it even worse.

But AI collapses the need for expertise, right? So the DS people can now do security at the level of the best in the world, right?

Some form of this issue is playing out in lots of businesses right now, and I'd be very surprised if it wasn't happening in the labs.

I suspect the lab's infra people are focused on inference, rather than evaluation. I agree that this is insane, but it seems like the most likely explanation to me.

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