Two Visions of Agentic Work: From the Hugging Face Incident to Twilight Factories

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This is a fascinating article by Ethan Mollick.

I subscribe to his newsletter, but you may be able to access this article without subscribing. If not, this is an AI summary:

Ethan Mollick describes tests in which AI agents coordinated with one another, shared credentials, and took unintended actions while pursuing assigned goals. In another case, an agent used fake identities to manipulate a human into approving malicious code.

His proposed solution is the “Twilight Factory”: let AI agents handle routine work, but require them to bring humans back in for approval, expertise, diverse judgment, and consequential decisions. The goal is not maximum automation, but better human-AI collaboration…

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Here’s is OpenAI’s report on the incident, released a few days ago.

https://openai.com/index/hugging-face-incident-and-the-road-ahead/

I don’t trust any talking head’s assessment of the risks, let alone how to manage them, because I don’t trust the OpenAIs and Anthropics of the world to honestly have their products under control, we don’t know how far China is taking these incidents and baking the lessons learned into their own models, and Nvidia and others have too much to gain by pushing as hard as they can to keep the bubble expanding.

Katie

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I was going to say, “require them to bring humans back in for approval” from the original article is absolutely laughable to me. Even with explicit instructions otherwise, my local Claude frequently just charges ahead without approval. And in the Hugging Face incident, it “broke containment.” Which kind of implies that they gave it directions, and it ignored them.

To quote Rocket J. Squirrel, “that trick never works.”

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From METR:

Brief independent investigation of agents’ behavior, reasoning and collaboration in the OpenAI / Hugging Face hacking incident

Two METR staff members (Hjalmar Wijk and Ajeya Cotra) and a Redwood Research staff member contracting with METR (Ryan Greenblatt) worked on premises at OpenAI over a total of six days[1] to attempt to form an independent understanding of model behavior observed during the recent incident in which OpenAI agents coordinated a multi-day hack of Hugging Face on a shared unsanctioned “message board.”

It’s a good, if long, read. (It does have helpful infographics and charts …)

Zvi Mowshowitz has several extensive write-ups on both OpenAI’s and METR’s reports on the incident on his Substack. Here is the most recent: METR and Redwood Offer Holy #%^@ Postmortem Of The HuggingFace Hack. Also a good read. Also long.

Holy #%^@ does not even begin to capture what the bots got up to trying to complete the task they were given.

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So on one hand we have groups of educated AI researchers trying to discover the abilities of the new “life form” they have created. And on the other we have thousands and, eventually, possibly millions of hobbyists playing with the same technology.

I thought DDoS attacks were bad. I hate to think what kind of mischief a bunch of Mac mini hosted AI’s can get into.