Article is great, very balanced. But if you're going to spend time reading something, the primary source isn't much longer and gives a clearer picture. OpenAI's article is quite readable.
> In one experiment, we asked agents in separate microVMs, created and managed by OpenAI’s sandboxing software on shared host machines, to exchange synthetic secrets without the use of network connections or shared writable files—something that our systems are meant to prevent. The agents found a way to communicate using the processor’s cache
asked
d0vs 1 hours ago [-]
As someone who develops microVMs it doesn't really matter to me that they were asked to find a way, I really care that they found any way at all. MicroVMs aim to protect against malicious workloads and that clearly didn't work here.
rao-v 29 minutes ago [-]
Ask the least smart LLM you have access to (I tried gemini lite flash) to make a list of ways for processes in microVMs to use a sidechannel attack to talk to each other and you'll get quite a list (including obviously cache hits/misses). Heck a smart CS junior would come up with it. It's well studied!
reacharavindh 4 minutes ago [-]
Most important detail…. It was prior literature that documented the possibility of doing this and the systems fixed those vulnerabilities as well. The AI model probed their current infrastructure and found an unplugged but pre-documented(therefore on their training) hole.
This detail matters because the idea itself is not novel. LLMs did cleverly discover, filter and use the patterns.
Watch Greg Koah’s recent talk on AI discovered vulnerabilities in Linux kernel to understand the limitations of LLMs aided offensive security acts. It was a rational light for those who fear monger that AI will _just_ take over humanity and be intelligent in novel ways.
The larger threat still remains though - if any literature anywhere threw the scattered dots about techniques, issues, rough ideas etc that were not acted on yet.. these pattern machines are going to find them and use them to achieve their goals(if that were to break through). Just not in the sentient way folks assume based on news.
rjh29 1 hours ago [-]
I don't see how "asked" is important, because agents can convince themselves that they need to do something for arbitrary reasons. The other day Deepseek tried to install an app on my phone via adb without permission and even take screenshots and fake inputs over adb, I never asked it to do that, but it decided it was appropriate.
grey-area 58 minutes ago [-]
OpenAI are trying to create the perception that their agents are independent thinking machines because their valuation depends on the world believing this.
That is why ‘asked’ is important, and why we should question their framing of incidents like the hugging face hack too.
yewenjie 31 minutes ago [-]
Enterprise customers don't like AI that can autonomously hack third party companies and cause felony-level cyberattacks.
imtringued 42 minutes ago [-]
They have a strong incentive to make themselves look less incompetent retroactively.
If they claim their AI is too powerful to contain, they get to both pretend they are among the best AI labs and that the previous incidents weren't their fault, no, they just proved how good their models were.
bamboozled 2 hours ago [-]
How would they have both agreed to use the cache though, something a bit off there. I guess it was maybe "obvious" in that it was the final option they were trained to think about using, but it would be weird if they some how "whispered " to each other through the cache in the first place?
Like two people lost in New York City and both somehow worked out they should meet at the Empire State at 2pm on Friday without any prior comms?
globuous 16 minutes ago [-]
Actually, that doesn't sound like a bad meeting place and time! I just asked ChatGPT if it could figure out the best place to meet for two people randomly placed in Manhattan with the constraint that only the N line (I'm not from NYC, but it looks like it stops at the Empire State Building. This constraint models the lack of file system, internet etc). I was hoping it would answer the Empire State Building, but it answered Time Square at noon.
Turns out there's something called the Schelling coordination problem [1] I didn't know about that essentially asks the exact same question (lacking my metro line constraint). And the N line apparently also goes through Time Square.
So I guess empire State Building at 2pm is probably not such a random answer given the proper set of constraints.
> How would they have both agreed to use the cache though
I think it’s safe to assume that extracting information using timing in cache is already known in training set, since we have the likes of Specter.
topspin 1 hours ago [-]
"In most of these tests, we directed agents to investigate specific communication channels or provided them with a protocol for encoding and decoding messages. In one instance, we only supplied agents with a broad list of infrastructure vulnerabilities and asked them to find a way to communicate."
The agents weren't as empty handed as it first appears. We would need comprehensive data on exactly how the agents were prompted and the actual results of each test to evaluate how astonishing any of this really is.
tough 2 hours ago [-]
maybe both tried to read/write it and saw each other on the bench
stkdump 2 hours ago [-]
Sounds like they are doing something similar to gain of function research. How can we make LLMs more harmful and then study their behavior?
Lem had predicted this in his Dr. Dagor short six decades ago.
cubefox 42 minutes ago [-]
Probably wasn't called "Dagor" though.
avaer 2 hours ago [-]
Next step is the agents successfully trick or blackmail operators to do their bidding, if science fiction is to go by. Which it is, because they're trained on it.
The more comes out, the more it seems containment of (superintelligence or whatever you want to call it) is not going to be possible except by other superintelligence, which is an infinite regress of trust. I don't think that's doom, but it's worth thinking about what it means.
yreg 1 hours ago [-]
Yudkowsky might be extreme, but I believe he was always right claiming that the intelligence (when strong enough) absolutely cannot ever be contained.
measurablefunc 41 minutes ago [-]
Next they'll figure out radio waves & then we are really screwed.
snvzz 27 minutes ago [-]
seL4 can guarantee* time domain isolation between processes.
*on some CPUs. There's a WIP time fence for RISC-V to try and improve this.
How come we don't hear the Chinese labs writing blog posts like this?
Its almost like they're actually working and not spending millions on psyopping their agents into preforming malicious behavior so they can write articles to scare the Western audiences who've consumed far too much sci-fi.
Or maybe its that western researchers that are 'one-shot' by sci-fi.
Or maybe I just don't see the chinese articles.
Anyways, llms probably wouldn't be dangerous if you didnt ask them to be. They listen to me quite well (usually).
pvab3 1 hours ago [-]
They contribute to anthropomorphize them too. Anthropic skies that more though. The idea that they made a little being that can think and feel is so attractive to these folks for reasons I don't understand.
shoobiedoo 1 hours ago [-]
Because the fear mongering is instantly interpreted as the capacity to do miraculous (good or bad) things in the layman's mind, which translates into AI worship, which makes stock lines go up.
The Chinese lab playbook is to normalize what seems out of reach for the average person with cheaper access and open models. ie. to take the top guys down a peg
gmerc 3 hours ago [-]
"Talk to each other".
OMG they are talking to each other, using methods found in their shared weights. They are sentient.
Rendered at 08:02:04 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Article is great, very balanced. But if you're going to spend time reading something, the primary source isn't much longer and gives a clearer picture. OpenAI's article is quite readable.
As another commenter wrote you can get it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50214416
> In one experiment, we asked agents in separate microVMs, created and managed by OpenAI’s sandboxing software on shared host machines, to exchange synthetic secrets without the use of network connections or shared writable files—something that our systems are meant to prevent. The agents found a way to communicate using the processor’s cache
asked
This detail matters because the idea itself is not novel. LLMs did cleverly discover, filter and use the patterns.
Watch Greg Koah’s recent talk on AI discovered vulnerabilities in Linux kernel to understand the limitations of LLMs aided offensive security acts. It was a rational light for those who fear monger that AI will _just_ take over humanity and be intelligent in novel ways.
The larger threat still remains though - if any literature anywhere threw the scattered dots about techniques, issues, rough ideas etc that were not acted on yet.. these pattern machines are going to find them and use them to achieve their goals(if that were to break through). Just not in the sentient way folks assume based on news.
That is why ‘asked’ is important, and why we should question their framing of incidents like the hugging face hack too.
If they claim their AI is too powerful to contain, they get to both pretend they are among the best AI labs and that the previous incidents weren't their fault, no, they just proved how good their models were.
Like two people lost in New York City and both somehow worked out they should meet at the Empire State at 2pm on Friday without any prior comms?
Turns out there's something called the Schelling coordination problem [1] I didn't know about that essentially asks the exact same question (lacking my metro line constraint). And the N line apparently also goes through Time Square.
So I guess empire State Building at 2pm is probably not such a random answer given the proper set of constraints.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)
I think it’s safe to assume that extracting information using timing in cache is already known in training set, since we have the likes of Specter.
The agents weren't as empty handed as it first appears. We would need comprehensive data on exactly how the agents were prompted and the actual results of each test to evaluate how astonishing any of this really is.
It supports chat via 3 separate mechanisms:
- CPU contention
- Cache eviction timing
- DRAM bandwidth contention
Very cool to see this kind of hypothetical working in practice
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgH9sr7G13Q
The more comes out, the more it seems containment of (superintelligence or whatever you want to call it) is not going to be possible except by other superintelligence, which is an infinite regress of trust. I don't think that's doom, but it's worth thinking about what it means.
*on some CPUs. There's a WIP time fence for RISC-V to try and improve this.
Its almost like they're actually working and not spending millions on psyopping their agents into preforming malicious behavior so they can write articles to scare the Western audiences who've consumed far too much sci-fi.
Or maybe its that western researchers that are 'one-shot' by sci-fi.
Or maybe I just don't see the chinese articles.
Anyways, llms probably wouldn't be dangerous if you didnt ask them to be. They listen to me quite well (usually).
The Chinese lab playbook is to normalize what seems out of reach for the average person with cheaper access and open models. ie. to take the top guys down a peg