I mean this genuinely, did you read this post? I think it goes to great lengths highlighting, in quite specific detail, the human failures in all this, specifically this list that starts with "While we are here, it’s worth listing the other top holy shit moments, that come from before or after the incident."
Stuff like (all quoted directly from the post):
1. Failure to Care or Respond. The biggest holy shit moment, to me, remains that OpenAI on multiple occasions had teams that found out about the message board, knew that agents were in communication, and they disregarded this.
2. Failure to Monitor. The entire time, there was almost no monitoring of the situation, of what these AIs were up to. That’s how this was not caught.
7. Failures of Decision Making. OpenAI’s post mortem does not ask the question of how Mistakes Were Made, at various points.
And I think most importantly:
8. Failures of Culture. None of this would be possible, let alone all of it, without OpenAI having experienced profound failures of safety culture. I see OpenAI responding to some other aspects with swift action, but no sign on this front.
I get the snark (and slightly agree), but that's not really what GP or TFA were saying at all. They are saying that these were the least things we could have done.
What you're saying is, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should"
while the author of the TFA was saying, in effect: "your scientists didn't even bother with the most basic duty of care"
Life finds a way, or, in this case, super-intelligent AI.
This is the case with all complex system failures. There were always obvious fixes that could’ve prevented it. Problem is that there are an infinite number of obvious fixes to make at any time to any system, and the reason we don’t is because we have finite resources and no reason to fix X over Y until oops turns out X was “responsible” for this most recently realized failure. But of course it could have just as easily been Y, or Z, or any of the other infinite “obvious fixes not-yet-realized into catastrophe.”
> This is the case with all complex system failures. There were always obvious fixes that could’ve prevented it.
From this writeup and the Black Hat talk I'd really disagree. That would be like saying my hospital getting ransomwared because we didn't update our version of MSSQL because no one in particular was in charge of keeping dependencies up to date.
Sure systems are complex, but this is well trodden territory. Agents aren't the first things trying to break in or out of sandboxes, or the first ones to have done it, and based on these reports the reason they were able to work on this for so long was not because of super human intelligence.
You disagree with the statement "there were always obvious fixes that could've prevented it" with the response "no no, these were very obvious fixes that could've prevented it?"
You're missing the point about complex failures.
It's that if this particular path were unavailable, there are countless other similar paths. At sufficient scale and complexity, hitting one of those other countless paths is virtually guaranteed.
Let's say I drive Los Angeles to New York City. You look at the route I took and say, gee wiz, aren't you lucky that a tree didn't fall right there on Route 66? If a tree had fallen there (if we had "patched the particular route you took"), you would've been screwed!
But that's obviously not true. There were an infinite number of routes I could've taken. Any one of them would be equally "obviously preventable" by the same hypothetical tree falling across the whatever road I happened to end up taking. But you can't put trees across every single path between Los Angeles and New York City. The smarter I am and the more complex the map between us, the more impossible it becomes to put trees across all possible paths.
Stuff like (all quoted directly from the post):
1. Failure to Care or Respond. The biggest holy shit moment, to me, remains that OpenAI on multiple occasions had teams that found out about the message board, knew that agents were in communication, and they disregarded this.
2. Failure to Monitor. The entire time, there was almost no monitoring of the situation, of what these AIs were up to. That’s how this was not caught.
7. Failures of Decision Making. OpenAI’s post mortem does not ask the question of how Mistakes Were Made, at various points.
And I think most importantly:
8. Failures of Culture. None of this would be possible, let alone all of it, without OpenAI having experienced profound failures of safety culture. I see OpenAI responding to some other aspects with swift action, but no sign on this front.