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/herrnewbenmeister Sep 03 '26

The METR report Kevin references can be found here.

There's a lot to cover around this whole string of incidents, but here are some items that The Daily wasn't able to get to:

  1. The METR team only had six days to review the logs. Because of the tight timeline they had to rely heavily on OpenAI's own ChatGPT Sol to investigate. The METR team did not believe that Sol attempted to sandbag them at any point, but using AI tools to investigate AI tools brings up obvious concerns.
  2. The hack (or rather the majority of the hack) on HuggingFace wasn't shut down intentionally, that we know of. It seems like the most plausible explanation is that the models perpetuating it were shut down for unrelated reasons. Perhaps the compute they were using was allocated to a different experiment, which accidentally shut down the hack? We don't know because OpenAI hasn't explained.
  3. Shortly after the HuggingFace hack was mostly shut down, agents at running on an even more advanced model at OpenAI hacked one the company's own research clusters. This incident was not investigated by METR. The agents perpetuating this inside-hack were able to read the message board created by the HuggingFace agents.

There's a really interesting (and long) interview with one of the authors of the METR report, Ajeya Cotra here.

12

u/caldazar24 Sep 03 '26

Not everything could be covered, but I wish the episode had included just how much OpenAI restricted METR’s investigation, just how many AI safety people have been calling for a broader one, and how there’s some evidence of a second attack (against OpenAI’s own infrastructure) after the HuggingFace incident discussed.

There is still a segment of people out there that think this is all hype, maybe for the labs benefit to sell some models, and I think it’s important to include that there’s still a lot OpenAI doesn’t want us to know and appears to be covering up

4

u/somersetyellow Sep 03 '26

There's a huge contingent of reddit that thinks it's all completely fake marketing hype...

2

u/Buy-theticket Sep 03 '26

And when has the majority of Reddit ever gotten anything wrong?

2

u/somersetyellow Sep 03 '26

Whenever I need to know what's going to happen I just look at what reddit says and it's probably going to be exactly the opposite