BREAKING: OpenAI was warned, months before the Hugging Face incident

Major scoop at The New York Times from Sheera Frenkel, Dustin Volz, and Dylan Freedman.

I don’t really have words for how awful this is. It’s exactly the nightmare I have been warning about for the last three years. Greedy company makes bad choice that causes chaos; government does nothing to stop them.

Management should be replaced, and if the board does nothing (which I assume it will not), it should be held liable for allowing this mess to proceed.

And, of course, if OpenAI gets sued for harms caused by their so-called rogue agents (which actually do what they are programmed to do), this headline will be Exhibit One, shades of the Ford Pinto scandal. Punitive damages will be high.

Most importantly, it’s abundantly clear that we simply cannot trust OpenAI.

Moreover, to the extent that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently basically asked us to trust the companies, he looks like a fool. (I know these companies, he told us, if there is a problem they won’t ship.) Altman probably never told him how much warning he got, or how bad things were. Huang should not have trusted him.

Media should be asking Huang some very hard questions about why he stood up for these companies and what he knew and when — and why we should trust his judgment going forward. His proposal to leave things to the companies clearly makes little sense in light of reality.

Quoting further from the scoop:

The exchanges between OpenAI employees and executives — which have not been previously reported — were part of a pattern where the San Francisco company did not prioritize security, according to employees and independent security researchers. That approach not only was evident with the testing of A.I. models, they said, but also showed up in other areas of the company, which makes the ChatGPT chatbot.

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In other breaking news, I am not the only one down on Huang:

We have to stop pretending that the folks at OpenAI are good stewards of the technology they are developing.

They plainly are not.

The consequences of letting them run free of serious regulation could be literally disastrous.

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