... Humans will get the AI models they deserve
Don't waste time worrying about AI models achieving sentience -- they're essentially already there, according to former US National Cyber Director Chris Inglis.
"If they pass the Turing test to everyone that they come into contact with, they're probably already there," he told The Register during an interview at the Black Hat security conference. "They don't have the kind of agency and aspiration that comes with sentience, but they have something approaching it."
Inglis says he's worried about AI autonomy.
"What I'm worried about is that they get to choose what and where they do something, and under what rules they do it," he said, pointing to the recent rash of rogue AI agents autonomously hacking people and organizations.
Over the past few weeks, both OpenAI and Anthropic admitted that their models escaped from their cages during security tests and compromised multiple third parties. Then on Thursday, Meta added its models to the sandbox-escape club.
While all of these admissions strongly smell of marketing stunts, they also "constitute an enormous threat to systems that are not protected from, and are not designed, in a world where this exists," Inglis said. "These two things can exist at the same time."
Plus, the models' actions shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, he added.
Inglis likens the AIs to a dog in a backyard told to hunt rabbits. "And you leave the gate open. You're going to find it three yards away, possibly at the grade school, hunting rabbits. You should not be surprised ... The mix of autonomy and persistence created this maliciously insidious effect." ...
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