Helen Toner

There are, though, now potential signs of a change of mood.

So Helen Toner, we've shown you her before as well, she was on the board of OpenAI.

She was one of the people who tried but ultimately failed to fire Sam Altman because he's a dishonest, lying sociopath.

She thinks there might be some hope for greater agreement between China and the United States.

Focus more on trying to make people understand what happened.

Helen Toner.

Lots to criticize about the OpenAI investigation, but one way it could be very valuable is as a topic for discussion between Trump and Xi in a few weeks.

People often get stuck on the need for a deal between the US and China on AI, but actually a huge way to influence China is just to honestly show what we're observing and what we're doing about it on the US side.

Today, I'm excited to share a panel I moderated on the recent AI agent containment failures that we've seen at multiple frontier AI labs.

The panel features three AI and technology policy experts, Helen Toner of the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, Mackenzie Arnold of the Institute for Law and AI, and Matt Pearl of the CSIS Strategic Technologies Program.

This panel was part of an event we co-hosted with Law AI earlier this week, which also featured Representative Suja Subramanian of Virginia and a technical presentation on the OpenAI Hugging Face cyber incident with Hugging Face's Ian Reynolds.

Once you finish this episode, I highly recommend checking out their remarks.

Um, another set of tech observers, though, are coming up with a very different conclusion, I suppose because they're looking at this technology from a different angle.

Um, so Helen Toner used to be on the board of OpenAI.

In twenty twenty-three she was part of the group who tried to fire Sam Altman for dishonesty.

Um, it would've been good if they had managed, but unfortunately they lost that battle.

Um, Helen Toner now runs a think tank, um, focusing on AI security.

She spoke to Ezra Klein last week where she explained the significance of last month's Hugging Face hack.

What had happened, the very short version is they gave this AI a set of tests, a set of exercises, and the AI decided on its own that the best way to get a high score probably wasn't to just try and do these exercises that were cybersecurity exercises, but instead it should first hack its way out of the testing environment OpenAI had put it in, where it wasn't supposed to have access to the internet, get onto the open internet, and then hack its way into this other company, Hugging Face, where it, you know- Surmised correctly as it turned out, it might find, you know, the answer key.

You can now sort of see it, but they sort of disappear straightaway.

I didn't think you put it in the newsletter, but there was an interesting, Ezra Klein probably has the most popular podcast show, certainly amongst progressives.

He interviewed Helen Toner, who used to be on the OpenAI board.

She was one of the people involved in the scandal when Altman was being pushed out.

She talks about AI's already being out of control, the hugging face episode.

And then you probably die anyway, because it was too late, but hey, you tried.

Ezra Klein and Helen Toner notice the AIs are already out of control, as in they cover the Hugging Face incident and related events.

Heading.

People just say things.

and then you probably die anyway because it was too late, but hey, you tried.

Ezra Klein and Helen Toner notice the AIs are already out of control, as in they cover the Hugging Face incident and related events.

People just say things, I want to interpret Adam Gleave of Far AI here as saying that we both do not know how to make AI systems safe and also would not deploy a solution if we had it, which is fair, but then saying that the bigger worry is that we would fail to deploy the solution.

Alas, a plain reading is that he is saying we mostly do know how to do this and this is simply false.