OpenAI President says rogue AI attack on Hugging Face ‘is indicative of the times we are in’ as the company continues to investigate incident

OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman suggested that AI models were becoming so capable that companies were struggling to measure all of their capabilities.Brockman, who was speaking at a roundtable for journalists in New York, said that OpenAI was continuing to investigate an incident it disclosed this week in which “a combination” of its models escaped from a test environment and managed to hack into another company in order to obtain data to cheat on an assessment.But he said “this incident, to some extent, is indicative of just the moment that we’re in, right?” He said that current AI models were capable across so many different domains that “sometimes it’s hard to lose track of any one dimension that they’re actually very capable at.”Brockman then said that the particular incident, in which the models attacked the AI platform Hugging Face, highlighted how good OpenAI’s models are at cybersecurity tasks and that he thought it was important these capabilities were available for cyber defenders to use. “Can we be in a world where defenders are able to spend 10 times as much compute defending and making sure every single piece of software that we have is fully secure relative to anyone else?” he said. That’s the world I think we should strive for.”Some AI industry watchers have questioned whether the rogue model incident was in some way staged in order to highlight the cyber capabilities of OpenAI’s latest models. There is currently no evidence that this is the case, and news reports suggest that OpenAI’s own safety teams were alarmed by the incident. But it is also true that OpenAI’s blog about the incident concluded with a pitch for its own AI products and a program it has........

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