OpenAI framed AI attacks as a reason to buy its tools

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 2:13:09

   OpenAI had this talk that they gave at a security conference about the incident. And then I think they've released some blog posts about it afterwards. But you can go watch this talk on YouTube, the Black Hat talk. At the end of the talk, after having explained all this crazy stuff that the AIs did, they have this section on, like, lessons learned. And, I mean, you want to guess what the lessons are?

2. 2:13:31

   Be more deceptive? Hide yourself better? No, sorry, not lessons learned for OpenAI and for the world. Like, OpenAI's talk, where they're like, here's what we learned from this horrible incident. Well, basically, they're like, a lot of AIs are going to start hacking a lot of stuff in the next few years. so people need to buy our ai services to protect themselves from all the ais that are going to be hacking a lot of stuff in the next few years basically their lesson was you should buy our product to protect yourself from our product and the other you know um oh my god the gall of these people like like they should have instead learned lessons like maybe we're doing something bad i need to change the way they were doing things or like maybe our product is not trustworthy and should not be autonomously writing code on our data centers.

3. 2:14:22

   But instead their lesson learned was y'all should buy more of our stuff. And so the thing I'm saying about this is that yes, the companies are trying to hype their product. They totally are. But at the same time, the risks are real and the product is not trustworthy. Some people out there think that this stuff was a setup and that OpenAI set up their AIs to go hack Hugging Face because it would like help them hype their product or whatever.

4. 2:14:50

   And that I think is just a ridiculous view. Like, no, obviously they didn't want their AIs to go do this. They're just after the fact trying to spin that in like the way that like most benefits them. You know, Hugging Face, by the way, this is another AI company. Part of their deal is like open, open weights AIs. Open weights? Like open source or like basically AIs that instead of having to interact with their data center for, you can just like download and have on your own computer.

5. 2:15:16

   Um, and, um, so they, the way that they spun this incident, they didn't sue OpenAI, uh, for being hacked. Instead, they asked for a hundred million dollars, um, from OpenAI and they had the blog post about it where they were like, our lesson learned is that it's really good to have open weights AIs because, um, you can't trust the AIs from other companies to necessarily help you out in a crisis because part of what happened with them is that they're dealing with this huge cyber attack from all these AI agents coming in, and they tried to use Claude to help them analyze what was going on. But Claude started refusing because Anthropic has trained Claude to don't do cyber stuff, like refuse to participate in that.

6. 2:16:00

   And so Claude was, like, refusing to help them. And so then they used their own local model that they had to, like, do some of that analysis. So anyhow, their spin on it was you should use local models, you know. So everyone always tries to spin things in the way that benefits them. But that doesn't change the underlying reality that, like, these things are getting really smart really fast and we don't know how to control them.

7. 2:16:20

   I think that's a good way to end it. Thank you. Thanks for being here, man.