What does the recent Hugging Face hacking incident teach us about the future of AI?

It's Consider This, where every day we go deep on one big news story.

Today, a hacking incident and the future of AI.

Earlier this month, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, said two of its AI models were involved in a, quote, "unprecedented cyber incident." The models autonomously hacked into another company, meaning acted on their own without direction from humans.

We thought that was really, uh, unprecedented.

We thought we had never really seen anyone, you know, uh, having this type of event.

That's Thomas Wolf, a co-founder of the company that got hacked, Hugging Face.

He says his company is used to being hacked, but this felt different.

For the first time here we had this, you know, this, this massive wave of seventeen thousand events occurring, um, roughly, roughly in parallel.

Very, very, um... just like, just like a whole swarm of attackers.

Incidents like this where AI models take autonomous action have some people scared.

Here's Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu.

He recently introduced a bill in Congress called the AI Kill Switch Act.

I would make sure that we have adequate testing and disclosure on the most advanced models and make sure they don't do catastrophic things like build a new virus that could cause a pandemic or cyber hack every financial institution.

Consider this.

The hacking incident between OpenAI and Hugging Face shows the power of AI models to act on their own.

How could that shape the development of AI technology? And should we be feeling panicky? From NPR, I'm Sasha Pfeiffer.