California’s Attorney General is the latest to join the more-than-a-dozen states investigating OpenAI over the Hugging Face swarm incident, Politico reports.
Meanwhile, the company put out a statement about the German wiki found to have been co-opted by a swarm of 3,000 OpenAI agents. The agents appeared to be coordinating on general knowledge evaluations, and were exploring whether they would get terminated after completing a fifth research task.
OpenAI’s statement is notable for its hollowness. It acknowledges the incident, saying that “our agents wrote to several internet sites,” but admits no fault and provides no details. It makes no mention of new reporting that some of the co-opted sites belonged to colleges, and one to a high school AP chemistry class.
The company disingenuously claims the wiki incident was already acknowledged by earlier papers going back as far as March:
Prior to the Hugging Face incident, we saw early signs of agents using the internet in unintended ways, as reported in [these, earlier, posts]. We considered the wiki incident to be an instance of misalignment similar to the ones we’d shared.
The pull-quote turned into an accompanying image just says: “We’re working on a framework for when and how we share AI misalignment incidents.”
I increasingly worry there might be a connection between OpenAI’s caginess about its swarm incidents and the brazen recklessness of its new model release. Maybe the scandal is deep enough to destroy the company. Maybe OpenAI isn’t just racing to beat its competitors to superintelligence, but to outrun the investigations.
I hope the attorneys general and members of Congress looking into the incidents move quickly. I hope they understand that OpenAI’s executives might be rushing to amass AI capabilities they hope will put them above the law but would just get everyone killed.
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.