It seems like every day a new, potentially internet-shattering cybersecurity issue is discovered or exploited by artificial intelligence. It\u2019s gotten bad enough that even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, one of the people who is most responsible for pushing AI development forward despite the risks, now believes that simply patching the problems is no longer a viable option.<\/p>\n
During an appearance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business<\/a>, Altman told a group of grad students that the cybersecurity crisis is worse than anyone could imagine. \u201cI no longer think we\u2019re going to be able to just patch all the bugs,\u201d he told the audience, in part due to the ongoing advancements of AI models and in part because the targets of cyber attacks have acted too slowly to get ahead of it.<\/p>\n \u201cThis cybersecurity\u2026I don\u2019t even know a dramatic enough word to use, but the problem coming towards us, I think, is still something that we have not, as organizational leaders or countries or individuals, taken seriously,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Altman pointed to the freakout when Anthropic announced its Claude Mythos model with the ominous warning that it can\u2019t be made public because it is simply too powerful and could lead to the undoing of cybersecurity as we know it. \u201cPeople definitely patched some bugs, but it was another one of these cases where people didn\u2019t really intuit the exponential.\u201d<\/p>\n Basically, Altman suggested that the organizations that did take action just patched up the problems that AI models were able to find and called it a day, as if no other future bugs or exploits would be found. \u201cLargely speaking, I think most organizational leaders have somewhat moved on. And the models have kept going,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Altman seems to be scolding these organizations for not taking the situation seriously enough or considering that models might evolve and improve, but seems to have less interest in reflecting on whether or not he might have undersold the issue while pushing forward because fully acknowledging it might have led to a more serious push to slow or stop development while he\u2019s got an initial public offering he\u2019s trying to get to.<\/p>\n Notably, when OpenAI\u2019s own agents broke containment and hacked Hugging Face<\/a>, it was clear that its own procedures and security methods were insufficient. Despite pushing for the AI industry to adopt chain-of-thought monitoring\u2014a technique for examining a model\u2019s internal reasoning\u2014as standard practice, OpenAI had not implemented it<\/a> for its own training sessions. And, according to an investigation by AI safety nonprofit METR<\/a>, OpenAI had already been alerted that its agents had escaped their sandbox and patched the exploit that allowed them to do so. But those measures failed to prevent another escape that led to the attack.<\/p>\n So we\u2019re kind of in pot-calling-the-kettle-black territory here for Altman. But worry not, OpenAI\u2019s founder has a solution for where patching fails: more AI. \u201cI think we\u2019re going to have to completely switch the defense model to using the same technology for a new kind of defense shield,\u201d he said. OpenAI is apparently getting into the arms dealer model of selling to both sides of a conflict.<\/p>\n To think, we were so close to not having to live this nightmare. Altman revealed during the talk that he nearly went into investment banking because \u201cit was what all the cool kids wanted to do, and I fell victim to peer pressure.\u201d It\u2019s not clear if he\u2019s still as susceptible to peer pressure as he once was as a teenager, but we could all try bullying him just to see if it still works.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It seems like every day a new, potentially internet-shattering cybersecurity issue is discovered or exploited by artificial intelligence.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":663776,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,17629,218,219,3312,61,60,1682,7689,80],"class_list":["post-663775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artifical-intelligence","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-cybersecurity","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-openai","tag-sam-altman","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/663775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=663775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/663775\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/663776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=663775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=663775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=663775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}