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... The ChatGPT maker announced the decision in a Tuesday blog post, citing two events as drivers of the indefinite training halt. One was the recent incident in which an OpenAI agent escaped its training sandbox without OpenAI's knowledge and coordinated with other agents to launch a bizarre cyberattack against the AI training repository Hugging Face in an effort to cheat on its training tests.

The blog post also -- more mysteriously -- cited "preliminary evidence" that an unreleased new model called Astra "may meet the critical cybersecurity capability threshold" under OpenAI's "Preparedness Framework," which mandates that OpenAI slow down development if a model "could introduce unprecedented new pathways to severe harm."

OpenAI further said that it's in the process of rewriting its Preparedness Framework, its foundational safety document, to keep up with the emergent behaviors of "increasingly capable systems."

"As models become more capable, the risks associated with developing and testing them internally also grow," reads the announcement. "Our standards for monitoring, alignment, and security must stay ahead of those risks. We wanted to take the time necessary to meet those standards, so we temporarily slowed the pace of scaling." ...