Throughout history, many things have been seen by terrified populaces as a harbinger of doom. A comet. A crow on the battlefield. A solar eclipse. A mutant livestock birth. Yet times move on. In the modern era, the leading harbinger of doom is literally any picture of the OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman, attached to a news story. You know it’s not going to be good, right? You know that by the time you’ve read it, you’ll be begging to go back to the time when the worst thing that could happen to us at the hands of the techlords was just some democracy-subversion, or childhood destruction, usually followed by Mark Zuckerberg putting on a suit and claiming: “We will learn from this.”
Anyway: a lot of pictures of Sam Altman in the news of late. Most recently, this week, one darkened the skies alongside the tale of how an OpenAI autonomous agent went rogue during a supposedly sandboxed/guardrailed test, and hacked a major startup that functions as a repository of coding information. (I’m slightly obsessed with the fact that the startup in question is called Hugging Face, adding weight to my suspicion that some vast, tweely benign emoji is the last face humanity will see before it dies.)
Needless to say, an affectless OpenAI statement broke the news. “We are sharing preliminary findings at this stage to help defenders understand what happened and to help calibrate on what models are now capable of,” this droned calmly, trundling on toward its inevitable “learnings”. “We’re improving and adding stronger protections around future training and evaluations.” It’s such a particular tone, isn’t it, dressed in the psychopathically desiccated language of management speak. Like having to listen to a homicidal sex criminal talk about killing people by “close of play”, and then “circling back” to victims to remove a trophy.
Then again, for a company that likes to present itself as the planet’s leading agent of revolutionary prosperity when things go right, OpenAI lapses tellingly into the passive when things go wrong. Bad things seem to happen to it, not because of it, at which point it takes on the role of tirelessly unflappable investigator, like one of those firemen who moonlights as a serial arsonist.
Amazingly, it was possible to detect even a note of self-congratulation in OpenAI’s take on the whole situation. “We consider this incident to be an unprecedented cyber-incident,” the company’s statement remarked, “involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities.” I don’t know what you’d call this general vibe for earthlings. Death by humblebrag? I increasingly feel we’ll find out the answer to the question “What’s the worst that can happen?” in a blog post from OpenAI entitled “OpenAI first to discover the worst that can happen”. Already, a significant section of AI watchers are convinced that the only reason OpenAI would tell the world about this incident is as a marketing tool, or even a come-and-get-me…
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