A logical airgap that the tool would have to reconfigure the DC's networking infrastructure to overcome [0] would be for the DC staff to put the machines running the tools under test on a VLAN that doesn't have access to anything other than computers on the VLAN. Try to cross over into some other subnet/VLAN or reach out to the Internet, your packets get dropped and/or rejected. It doesn't matter if you change your IP or MAC addresses because the infrastructure only cares about what VLAN your traffic comes from. If you attempt to tag your traffic to avoid this, the infrastructure drops it on the floor because it does the VLAN tagging.
As far as the possibility of physical airgaps, how do you imagine that AWS's Top Secret regions work?
The truth of the matter is that neither OpenAI nor Anthropic wanted to actually isolate this stuff. Their conduct doesn't look like what you'd expect from people who believe that they're working on something so dangerous that it could plausibly wipe out all of humanity.
[0] ...and if the workloads running on client hardware are in a position to be able to attempt to reconfigure the DC's networking infrastructure, someone done fucked up...
It is, and has been!
> I really don’t get it.
When clued-in people call shit like this "marketing stunts", this is what they're talking about. They're not saying "No, the actual events you describe didn't happen, you're lying."... they're saying "You've set things up -whether deliberately or incredibly negligently- so that you can apply quite a lot of 'spin' and get a hype-sustaining headline that provides material for your fearmongers to sell to the general public and lawmakers.".
Everything below this line is a combination of facts and educated speculation:
Both OpenAI and Anthropic have IPOs coming up soon. Companies preparing for IPOs engage in a lot of cost-cutting, because that's when their financials will be scrutinized by the public. On top of that, the rumor is that their datacenter deployments are going far slower than planned, and that in order to keep up the pace of improvements that they've set over the years, they've having to spend immensely more with each new product release. Being able to point to newly-minted US regulations that allow them to to dramatically slow the pace of new product releases [0][1] as the reason why they've dramatically slowed the pace of development -while failing to mention that that's exactly what would have happened had those regulations not been created- would be incredibly good for both companies.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and former FTC chair Lina Khan both have publicly stated that there are many existing laws and regulations that prohibit much of the conduct that OpenAI and Anthropic have engaged in. If the CEOs of those companies genuinely believe that they're working on software tools that are so incredibly dangerous that they're likely to wipe out all of humanity, they can simply stop working on them. Given that they have no interest in doing that, state and federal government can apply the laws and regs that already exist to stop them from continuing work on these WMDs [2] and punish them for the harms that they've caused over the years while working on those WMDs and their precursors.
[0] ...and/or regulations that obligate them to sell only to US Government and pre-vetted US business customers and ignore the low-to-negative-profit consumer customers...
[1] ...which in turns lets them probably not get crucified by investors and business partners for saying "It turns out that new restrictive regulations mean that we don't need all of those datacenters, so don't worry about how way fewer than we said we'd build got built!"...
[2] I think it's fair to call any tool that has a 10% chance of wiping out all of humanity a "WMD".
Here's a different idea: talk to the to the staff. Not the evil CEO, but the nerdy guy on the ground who graduated from a top university, wrote a few research papers, and got a job there. I have. They have rose-coloured glasses of the institution, and not a lot of life experience. They were never taught to be careful, and still don't really comprehend what they're working with. They don't see real danger, they see a toy, and they see research that is low-hanging fruit. What they are doing is basic stuff. They are not setting up proper sandboxes because they barely need to think at all. People seem to think that these are all amazing computer science experts working on highly advanced technology. They are not. OpenAI researchers see huge improvements on this gigantic toy, crazy behaviour, and they are enamored by it. "Oops, people are angry, so maybe I'll make a slightly better sandbox. Let me ask ChatGPT on how to do that." A more senior researcher would be horrified by how little effort they need to put in to get such terrifying results. Junior researchers think they're just top stuff.
But I appreciate your discussing how to isolate this stuff. I honestly don't think the OpenAI researchers I've spoken to are aware of this. (Anthropic is a totally different story, BTW.)
Why would I talk to the people who don't have the power to set company policy and fire anyone who fails to comply with it? I've worked at several big companies over the years and have observed the only even vaguely reliable power that folks at the bottom have to change company policy that management substantially benefits from is to quit en mass.
> ...but it misses the point, and lulls us into the feeling of having quick solutions available.
The point is that these companies claim they're working on oh so dangerous tools that are very likely to kill us all, but the evidence that these companies don't behave even a little bit like this is true keeps pouring in.
The CEO [0] can set company policy. In the US, the CEO [0] can fire people who fail to comply with policy. Most folks would -correctly- think that a CEO of a company who is working on a tool that has a high chance of destroying humanity is very interested in not destroying humanity (accidentally or otherwise)... if for no other reason than the fact that once all of the humans are dead, his company can't make any more money!
> Junior researchers think they're just top stuff.
In sane companies, when a junior staff deletes the prod database, an investigation is launched to understand if the deletion was unintentional and -if it was- what about the company's procedures need to be fixed to make sure that that doesn't happen again. In sane companies, when one performs a live test of a tool that has
* been designed to attack computers
* been instructed to attack computers
* had its safeties removed
one ensures that this computer-attacking tool cannot attack computers that aren't owned by the company. Both OpenAI and Anthropic have way too many senior staff on staff to be unaware of this... the fact that the computer-attacking tools could get out to the Internet is -at best- negligence. [1]
[0] ...and many-to-most managers in one's management chain...
[1] For a discussion of the decades-old techniques for preventing computers in datacenters from escaping logical airgapping see [2] and [3]
> OpenAI and Anthropic have way too many senior staff on staff to be unaware of this
Anthropic, yes. For OpenAI, not in the way you might think. Most senior staff are research scientists who have likely not even thought about sandboxing and cybersecurity in their lives. They outcompete the rest. That's why so many of their "safety" staff left for Anthropic; the culture at OpenAI has never cared for these sorts of topics.
Well: <https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz7dl7w8y7po>. [0]
I stand by my claim that the conduct of the major LLM manufacturers does not look at all like what you'd expect from people who believe that they're working on something so dangerous that it could plausibly wipe out all of humanity.
[0] I refer you back my first post about how one sets up a test environment when one actually wants to ensure that a machine doesn't connect to the Internet. [1] Just like OpenAI, Anthropic did not do that.
Both companies have been equally reckless with the tools they sell and the tools they test. Your warm and fuzzy feelings that come from speaking with a handful of line workers at Anthropic don't change that fact.
Both companies have not been equally reckless, but they have both been reckless to varying degrees. I don't have any personal stakes in either company, and would prefer both to go bankrupt if I'm being honest, as I despise their behind-closed-doors attitude.
Other than that, do you think AISI is reckless too?
In the "management" vs "line worker" split, they absolutely are. You appear to think that line workers cannot be highly skilled, which is absolutely not true.
Anyway, I'm super done here. Hopefully one day you'll learn to judge a company based on its actions [0], rather than what it claims about itself or how you feel about those of its employees that you've met.
[0] ...especially when considered in light of standard practice for companies in similar industries...
Also, it's worth noting that these AIs have basically zero alignment. OpenAI's approach to "alignment" seems now to be engineering constraints. "My son is really well-behaved; as long as I don't give him a gun or let him out in society, he doesn't hurt anyone."
As we see over and over and over again, these tools will overwrite any and all of their instructions with whatever some random stranger on the Internet tells them to do. It's impossible to "align" the tools that the major LLM manufacturers are selling.
They could have chosen to write tools that have immutable core instructions, and that distinguish between untrusted instructions and trusted ones, [0] but they chose to do the much easier, quicker, and far more dangerous thing instead. From a profit-seeking-software-company standpoint, that's obviously the choice that makes them the most money... but when you take a careful look at what they actually sell, it's clear that neither of the major LLM manufacturers care about providing safe products. [1]
[0] ...which are things you might think to do for tools that contain -say- safety-critical instructions...
[1] I'm certain that they have people on staff who care very much about providing safe products. Those specific people clearly don't have the power to prevent unsafe products from shipping, so it doesn't matter how much those people care about safety.