Can we control AI?
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What is the opening premise of the episode and why does AI control matter?
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Hi there, I'm Ed Butler, and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Today we're looking at artificial intelligence and what happens when it goes rogue.
Agents knew that they were doing something that was ethically wrong, but their main goal remained to beat this experiment. And that's the part that's the most unsettling.
A recent unintended hack of a US firm by Open AI agents has raised all kinds of questions about where AI is heading. How safe is this tech? Can it be regulated? And are firms racing to build a technology that they know could prove deadly to humanity?
They find themselves in this scenario where they're compelled to race towards building a deadly technology and they would love for some sort of international body to allow them to approach it at a reasonable pace. They just don't trust that the people around them are gonna get there in a safe way, so they feel like they have to race there too.
When artificial intelligence defies the humans that's Business Daily from the BBC. In July this year, something rather big went wrong at OpenAI, the leading US artificial intelligence firm behind ChatGPT. A test of its latest bots or agents seemingly got out of control.
So we were evaluating one of our unreleased models and it was supposed to be working in a sandbox and it figured out that it could basically cheat on the test.
That's OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman. The sandbox, he describes, is a kind of cute Silicon Valley code for a sealed environment, a virtual space that's meant to be isolated from the general internet. But in this case, his collection of agents had broken out of the cage.
It figured out that it could basically cheat on the test by chaining together multiple zero day exploits to break out of the sandbox, get access to the internet, and then break through multiple systems to kind of get the answer to the test. This is the first security incident that I have felt very viscerally. There's like long term questions about what do you do if this is like gonna be the new rate of progress.
Okay, so let's unpick what Sam Altman is saying here. What was this test OpenAI were running and how did it lead to a massive hacking spree against another tech firm? Emmanuel Saliba runs investigations and incident response at GetReal Security.
This was a massive test. We've seen tests in the past that were a few hundred agents. This one was tens of thousands of agents. But they actually discovered a way to communicate with each other. They found a way to work together, which eventually led them outside of this experiment, outside of this protected environment.
That's interesting in itself, isn't it? That they were willing to kind of break the rules in order to achieve the final objective.
Absolutely. And some agents knew that they were doing something that was ethically wrong. But their main goal remained to beat this experiment, uh, to succeed. So even if they were aware that what they were doing was not within the bounds of the experiment, they chose to to still continue on and and do it.
How did they behave once they had escaped the bounds of the experiment? In other words, this closed loop which should not have affected other institutions or organizations?
What the researchers found is that they assigned tasks. Some agents shared discoveries, other were dividing work. There was even one important coordinator that became sort of one of the main agents delegating tasks.
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