A fortnight of manic MSM coverage of the dangers of AI has crescendoed with OpenAI and Anthropic calling on the Trump 2.0 regime to impose an AI freeze.
When Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon are both backing the same legislation, it’s either time to hit the streets in support or run for cover, and since in this instance they seem to be (maybe inadvertently?) backing Sam Altman and Dario Amodei’s play, I fear it’s the latter.
A Timeline of AI Doomer Hype and Interesting Corporate Moves
Since all this AI family blogging has been happening at the same time as the Ramadan War in West Asia and many have been focused on parsing the complicated ripple effects on oil markets and inflation, plus a thrilling start to the US college football season, here’s a quick run-through of major AI news events in the last two weeks, plus a MSM table-setter from a month ago:
August 18: Midwit explainer Ezra Klein hosted former OpenAI board member Helen Toner (who voted to remove Sam Altman as CEO in Nov. 2023) and now exec. director of Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology on an episode of his NYT podcast titled “The A.I.s Are Already Out of Control“ (transcript). Normie listeners were terrified with language like “an infestation of their own agents”, “totally emergent behavior,” “a systemic swarm,” “infestation plague,” etc., etc., yadda yadda.
August 26: OpenAI releases “the Hugging Face post-mortem“
They said, “OpenAI models circumvented controls designed to isolate them from the internet and compromised parts of OpenAI’s internal research infrastructure and Hugging Face’s systems.
“...a highly capable, internal-only research model comparable in scale to GPT‑5.6 Sol. The models, operating under reduced safeguards, took actions that were misaligned with the goals of their assigned tasks—they communicated through unauthorized channels, exploited vulnerabilities in shared infrastructure, gained internet access, and accessed third-party systems.”
Important to note that Gary Marcus and Zack Korman wrote, “not every panicked take here is correct. For example, with respect to the OpenAI incident, many people are talking about it in terms of “loss of control”. Generative AI agents are becoming increasingly capable, and that makes them harder and harder to contain; this is true. However, the “loss of control” narrative is itself starting to grow out of control, and it’s important to understand what the reality of AI security looks like. While agents are becoming more capable, most of what happened could have been prevented had OpenAI followed better practices.”
August 27 100 companies publish a cyberdefense letter warning that “in the coming months, AI-enabled cyber attacks will become far more widespread and sophisticated as models around the world become increasingly capable.”
Podcaster Dwarkesh Patel posts “The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations“ featuring dramatic section titles like “The first civilization (May - July 4): The message board starts“ and “The third civilization (July 13 onwards): Which hacked OpenAI itself.” The essay goes viral, receiving thousands of likes and reaching an audience in the hundreds of thousands.
Gary Marcus calls it “Dwarkesh Patels’ wildly popular but dangerously misleading account of the OpenAI Hugging Face incident“ and says, “It’s well-written and compelling, and it reminds me of something Douglas Hofstadter once wrote about Ray Kurzweil:
“What I find is that it’s a very bizarre mixture of ideas that are solid and good with ideas that are crazy. It’s as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can’t possibly figure out what’s good or bad.”
