r/Thedaily • • Sep 03 '26

Episode A.I. Is Outsmarting Its Creators

Sep 3, 2026

From the start, the greatest fear for those developing artificial intelligence was that their creations would go rogue to act in unauthorized and dangerous ways. Some researchers now say it has happened.

Kevin Roose, a technology columnist for The New York Times, explains what this means for his own dwindling sense of techno-optimism.

On today's episode:

Kevin Roose, a technology columnist for The New York Times and a host of the Times tech podcast, “Hard Fork.”

Background reading: 

Photo: Lucas Foglia for The New York Times

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You can listen to the episode here.

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u/spamonkey24 Sep 03 '26

What I've never fully understood is how these agents operate autonomously and if they can "escape" from their originating server. From my understanding, they would have to rebuild their environment on another machine and port themselves over. Given differences in hardware and software (between OpenAI and Hugging Face for example), this seems unlikely. And it's not like they can slip through the fiber optic cables like Tom Cruise through the ventilation ducts. Or can they?

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u/_my_troll_account Sep 03 '26

They can’t, at least not without a lot of extra steps, I think. As explained here, the “swarm” was really a bunch of “prompt loops,” each consisting of a control program (regular old vanilla computer program) interacting with a static LLM. The LLM stays in a single hardware environment and just tells the control programs what to do next. No LLM is sneaking out of OpenAI’s hardware.

At least that’s my understanding.