Did OpenAI Create “Secret AI Civilizations”? | Tech Decoded

So I thought I was done talking about OpenAI's hack of hugging face from back in July. But then last week, OpenAI released a whole new trove of sensationalist details about that incident. Their story included things like agent swarms communicating on secret message boards and musing to themselves about how to deceive their human creators. Here's how Dorkish Patel summarized OpenAI's revelations. Over the course of three months at OpenAI, three consecutive secret AI civilizations got started, then got wiped out only to reemerge from the predecessor's ashes. This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself. All this happened while humans remained more or less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy. Alright. Not surprisingly, this caused an explosion of anxiety and hang reading ringing among the AI commentariat and their audience. But what's really going on here? Do these new details about the OpenAI hack change the narrative? Is it enough to finally convince East Coast AI realists such as myself that we have indeed wandered into an Elias Joukowsky fever dream? This is what I wanna discuss today. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm going to address a a key series of questions raised by these new revelations, and I'm gonna do my best to give you some measured answers. I'll then conclude with my suggestions for what I think the right way is in our current moment to think about what happened and what we should do going forward. As a quick aside, I also wrote about this over on my newsletter at calnewport.com. If you like these type of computer science style critiques of AI coverage, you should sign up for that newsletter over there at calnewport.com. Alright. Let's get into it. Alright. The first question I want to address that comes out of the new revelations is what's the deal with agent swarms? I think the idea of a swarm is something that is really unsettling to people, especially when they hear these discussions from OpenAI about essentially societies of agents that are working together and arguing with each other and rising and falling. Interestingly and coincidentally, at the same time that all this was going on, my 13 year old son is reading Michael Crichton's 2,002 book, Prey, where Michael Crichton takes on the topic of AI. And guess how he personifies the AI villain in this book? As a literal swarm of minor small agents that work together and are are brilliant and do all sorts of scary things. So swarms are scary. So I think it's really important to address from a technical perspective what are these AI swarms so that we can better put what we're hearing into context. Okay. So remember, as I talked about last week on this show, when we're talking about these AI going rogue like in these attacks, we're always talking about a very specific type of system that we can call a prompt loop, and it works …