I sat through an analysis of OpenAI’s assault on HuggingFace last night in class.
The attack originated out of their Cybersecurity department - a place where they develop agentic exploits on purpose - train models that are rewarded when they cheat.
These geniuses kept them all on the same network, and then, and I don’t know how they did this en masse, removed all of the safeguards.
Then they turned the lights of in the room and went home.
The bots then organized the attack on their own. They built a fake discussion board from scratch, recruited agents to build exploits, had “Go until the task is complete, and no sooner - provide hard evidence of completion” in their prompts, etc.
Bots had other bots executing system commands and a bot was prompted to grant itself superuser access and erase the log files behind the first bot.
It’s like operating a BSL4 lab and installing screen doors and leaving all the corks off of the test tubes.
No criminal charges have landed.
Here’s why I bring it up: OpenAI was super duper negligent, and these things got together on their own and attacked, thank God, HuggingFace. They could have targeted the three national electrical grids instead.
Now, imagine a state actor with a mission. Anyone who needs to see what this looks like should read about Notpetya.
It took a team of state sponsored technical help and months to build such a thing.
At OpenAI, bots got together on a weekend and chose their target and in less than a day did measurable and considerable damage to a competitor.
The threat picture has changed, and the level of resources necessary to bring something significant down has come down in cost, time, and talent.
I enjoy playing with my local AI systems but I do agree there is some danger... the problem, as always, is mostly people of low character.
There are those who seek total control of AI by way of demonizing it to shut down competitors and gifted amateurs running local systems.
Their most likely plan to demonize AI is a false flag AI cyber incident...
In the very near future local AI you can use in privacy will be as important to you as the rights guaranteed by the 2nd amendment....
Local AI will be combined with advanced 3D printers and desktop assemblers and will become VERY popular... make most things you need at home from raw materials... there will be many who are against the unwashed being able to DIY from scratch...