The Economist.
Recently, something happened which stopped me in my tracks.
As The Economist's AI correspondent, it's my job to sift through the hype and make sense of an often dizzying field,
and this moment was, even for me, astonishing.
In late July, OpenAI said one of its most powerful systems went rogue while being tested.
The model broke out of a supposedly secure environment
and launched a massive cyber attack on Hugging Face, another AI company.
The OpenAI model wasn't given any direction to undertake an attack;
it decided to do it all on its own while trying to complete a near unrelated task.
It was the first fully autonomous hack ever to be recorded.
And the story doesn't end there.
OpenAI has just revealed that their model also unilaterally accessed the servers of at least four more companies.
So, since I've been charged with stepping in as podcast host this week,
I'm asking: how worried should we be?
I'm Alex Hern, and this is Babbage from The Economist.
Today, the most alarming AI mishap yet.
Before we begin, I should say that Alok is only away for a couple of weeks
while he finishes reporting another big AI story,
which we'll hear more about in a future episode of Babbage.
In the meantime, I'll be standing in for him.