You.com and Recursive CEO Richard Socher sits with Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi to break down the highly publicized Hugging Face security incident, and debunks the viral myth that an AI model "escaped" its sandbox.
What did you think about the the hugging face uh incident?
there's a couple issues in terms of how it was reported. A lot of folks uh very much anthropomorphized this and I understand why. It's like so easy to try to give an analogy to people and they say, oh the AI escaped. But most people when they think about someone or something escaping think that, you know, let's say the prisoner is in the prison, he escaped and so now he's outside of the prison. But the AI is very much still inside computers and servers of open AI. Nothing about the model has truly escaped in the sense of like it is now running on a different computer. It did exploit a bunch of very obvious security flaws uh in both uh the sandbox environment uh and the hugging face servers. Like there are some passwords that were just like open and publicly available on the internet and uh the I found those passwords and then used them to log in. and that is indeed a concern. Like I think uh it was a failure on Open Eye side. But the I think the biggest issue that's showing uh here is that we have a problem with uh what's called reward hacking and alignment. What actually started this whole thing is that Open AI asked an AI to solve a very hard intellectual problem. Uh it's kind of like what we ask kids, like you're going to have a very hard exam. And now the kid could do the right thing and just study for the exam, try to understand the material in order to then answer the questions correctly. The kid could also try to hack into their, you know, school's computer, try to bribe their teacher, try to like, you know, intercept uh the like test score, tests uh questions and so on somewhere and try to hack the exam that way. And then clearly that's not, that wasn't the intent, right? And so I think right now AI has gotten smart enough uh to find all kinds of ways around to get to the objective that you sort of objectively stated, but you didn't mean. And so the I think we're already seeing the first versions of this, but next generations of AI will get better and better at knowing what you mean, rather what you said.
That's let me just go like really weird big picture here. If if we had now have AI that is trying to like understands like what I might mean, what does that even mean for humanity? Like that's wild, dude. It's wild stuff.
It will be. I think there will be some changes in the positive and the negative. I do think a lot of people will just get lazy and lazier and just like be less good at communicating clearly in writing. Um now, fortunately, you still have to be able to communicate speaking well and like so you have to memorize things. Otherwise if you every conversation every 30 seconds you're like, uh let me look up some facts to like continue a fun conversation. You're just less of a good conversation.
But I'm saying it's actually it's actually like I'm going to be looking at my computer very soon and I'm not going to have a keyboard, there's no mouse and I'm just going to have this AI running and it's just going to create things.
Yeah, and you manage agents, we're all going to become managers. Now, managing is also, a lot of people think, oh, it's easy, you just tell people what to do. But like, it's hard, right? Like managing like people and agents is hard. You have to delegate the right level, like you have to be good at your communication and be very like uh unambiguous in terms of what you're asking the AI to do. And so I think that will be a big sign of things to come. Now, I think in terms of education we need to change because part of education will just have to be sort of a gym for the mind where you could go to a gym and just have a robot lift weights up and down, right? But it's useless. You're not going to see the gains. The problem is that, yeah, when you go to the gym, you see physically your gains. When you go to school, you don't necessarily see your gains in your brain right away. But when you memorize a poem or you learn an instrument or something, this is uh just to actually train your brain and not because it immediately makes money or is useful as a job, but it's just helpful to make sure that organ is healthy and at its peak capacity. And so I think that's half of education, the other half is learning how to work with AI.
