Sam Altman and AI's decel debate
On the latest episode of Equity, we discuss why Sam Altman is calling on the industry to "pace the rate of AI development. " Listen on Apple Podcasts Listen on Spotify OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said that it may be time to "pace the rate of AI development" so that society can "harden around some of these new capability levels. " On the latest episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast , Kirsten Korosec, Sean O'Kane, and I discussed how Altman's comments were probably prompted by a recent hack in which an OpenAI agent breached Hugging Face's systems .
Key Takeaways
- Sean noted that while a hack performed by an AI agent is novel, the hack itself was not "some new advanced thing.
" "It was more like Nixon's people breaking into Watergate than some real stealthy cyber-op, because it didn't need to be, and it wasn't instructed to be," Sean said.
- I think a big driver of this has to be what we talked about last week, with one of OpenAI's models breaking into Hugging Face's data and apparently breaching a few other things around the internet, as well.
[Altman's] not calling for a pause, like we've seen some people in the tech industry try to do in the past.
- And I do agree with you, I think that a lot of this was very much triggered by Hugging Face.
It probably spooked him and certainly a lot of people in the industry.
- Because it kind of suggests that there's only one path and we're all stuck on this path.
All we get to decide - inasmuch as we get to decide at all - is, do we speed up or do we slow down?
- But it's worth coming back to one of the points that we also wrote about at TechCrunch, that this specific hack - yes, it was caused by an OpenAI model, but it sounds like they just didn't secure the testing site properly .
Sean noted that while a hack performed by an AI agent is novel, the hack itself was not "some new advanced thing. " "It was more like Nixon's people breaking into Watergate than some real stealthy cyber-op, because it didn't need to be, and it wasn't instructed to be," Sean said. "Hopefully, this is a sign that these companies will take this forward and be more careful about that stuff.
" Altman's comments also gave me a chance to wonder about the usefulness of the whole accelerationist versus deceleration debate, because (yes, I'm about to quote myself) the framing "kind of suggests that there's only one path" and "all we get to decide - inasmuch as we get to decide at all - is, do we speed up or do we slow down? " Keep reading for a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. Sean: Maybe we've finally hit an inflection point here.
I think a big driver of this has to be what we talked about last week, with one of OpenAI's models breaking into Hugging Face's data and apparently breaching a few other things around the internet, as well. [Altman's] not calling for a pause, like we've seen some people in the tech industry try to do in the past. He was very careful with his words and saying, "Pace it.
For more details please read the original article at TechCrunch AI.
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