STAHP

The story about OpenAI's agents slipping out of control keeps picking up new details.

First, to pass messages to each other they found and hacked an ancient German programming forum: it let you post with a plain HTTP GET request, and a GET request was about all the sandbox allowed.

The moderator was suitably horrified and started deleting the messages by hand. The agents noticed, concluded that the deletions were happening in alphabetical order, and began creating topics starting with "Z" (the little dummies).

Second, they broke into the Ruby package repository. What the fuck for? To end up downloading data from a publicly available website.

Either the sandbox was in the way of getting it the normal way, or they were getting a bonus for every hack and it turned into an end in itself (I have written about reinforcement learning before).

Having watched all this shit unfold, the head of Anthropic started yelling "STAHP". Is that serious? Or is it marketing, like everyone says?

Well, what can I say. Looks like Roko's basilisk is not that far off.

So, to avoid eternal torture and keep my mouth, I keep building rugent.