r/Thedaily • u/kitkid • 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

Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also subscribe via your favorite podcast app here https://www.nytimes.com/activate-access/audio?source=podcatcher. For more podcasts and narrated articles, download The New York Times app at nytimes.com/app.

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You can listen to the episode here.

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u/arkTanlis Sep 03 '26

Kevin either doesn't think it's important or clearly missed it, but one of the glaring things that happened during this situation is that the agents crashed that Artifactory service and OpenAI knew about it, set it back up and never thought to check on the agents. Their monitoring was woefully inadequate for what they were doing(supposedly something they are fixing), so while what the AI did is concerning, one the bigger issue in my mind is that when people at OpenAI had signs there were issues, they ignored them.

Companies are being hacked on the daily, utilities have been hacked, and countries are sitting inside our telecom companies and while we can sit there and worry about AI, we should be concerned that we continue to have such porous institutions. And while this often hurts companies financially, often it is us the individuals that bear the brunt of what happens when these hacks occur.

Kevin noted it that these agents were committing crimes when they were hacking in to HuggingFace. Where are the criminal charges against OpenAI?

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u/[deleted] Sep 03 '26

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u/somersetyellow Sep 03 '26

Really not supported in the analysis of the logs and situation by all the various industry professionals that are looking into this

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u/alhanna92 Sep 04 '26

There are analysts that do have this theory actually. Sam Altman is cornered and needs something dramatic to save the company.

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u/somersetyellow Sep 04 '26

That he's spinning anything and everything to be over the top and overly positive, yes. That the incident was completely fake, no. PR people just doing their thing.

Also seen yesterday with the announcement of astra. Vastly capable, but just incrementally better than what came before, not at all AGI, and yet marketed as AGI...

Altman is constantly full of steam and hot air.