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#law#immigration#don#agents#better#immigrant#openai#more#power#immigrants

Discussion (70 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

bluegatty•28 minutes ago
"OpenAI models attack websites and take anything they can out of them because that is the business model of the company."

No, good gosh let's stop with the hyperbole.

The models were given instructions to get answers by any means in a loose test harness, not to steal stuff, moreover, they're not 'learning from OAI staff'.

If we are cynical, we could say the 'lax security was on purposes - hoping for a big media event'.

And OpenAI is 100% responsible for the actions of their Agents - but lets' not overstate or conflate what is gong on.

pj_mukh•8 minutes ago
Truly quite an embarrassing take by the Prospect. But alas, such are the Overton Window games.
christkv•7 minutes ago
So why is OpenAI not charged with Cybercrimes. You would be if you did the same.
GTP•5 minutes ago
This is a good question (unfortunately a good answer is given in the article), but it is orthogonal to the why LLMs are committing cyber crimes.
plastic-enjoyer•24 minutes ago
Aren't these capabilities trained into the models by RL on cybersecurity benchmarks?
bluegatty•14 minutes ago
The 'capabilities' are more around creative problem solving. The notion of legality, property, propriety - those are second order issues.

They are not making models to be evil.

They are making them to be relatively autonomous though, and 'identity centric' as opposed to just making them 'policy machines'.

Altman and Dario are not evil or even jerks really. They are 'talking really big' and there might be some sketchy underhanded things but I think relatively minor.

Also - given how powerfully bad AI can be, this could be 100x worse.

I think most other companies would have weaponized the AI a long time ago for competitive use etc..

OAI and Anthropic are private companies, projecting narratives way out of proportion but they are not evil, at least not yet.

Jensen, Dario, Altman in similar category. Not like Musk. And a bit different than Sudar or Satya who are more polite board-approved corporate creatures.

k310•about 3 hours ago
Wilhoit's law.

“Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

https://pylimitics.net/wilhoits-law/

bluegatty•26 minutes ago
This is a lazy and ridiculous bit of twitter fodder and has noting to do with the article, which itself is poorly written.
vivekd•21 minutes ago
I'm sorry but this is just ridiculous.

First you don't know what the parents political leaning is. They may be conservative, they may also just as likely be liberal It's foolish to assume their political leanings from just one post just because you disagree with them.

Second they're not saying that in groups or open AI should not be bound by the law. They're saying open AI did not actually break the law. You're free to disagree and explain why you disagree. That would be welcome. But calling them a conservative and saying they think the rich shouldn't be bound by the law is ridiculous

yutter4•about 2 hours ago
So, just like all of the others then?
jongjong•about 2 hours ago
That's not conservatism, that's what any system of governance consists of.

Humans are prone to hypocrisy because they have blind spots. The luckier a person is, the easier they have it, the faster and higher they rise, the more ignorant/delusional they are by the time they reach the top. At the top, these people have the power to shape the world in accordance to their fanciful beliefs and severely skewed/optimistic worldviews.

There aren't many people in power who understand reality unfortunately because everyone who got any power had to be very lucky to get it.

The people who get to power are often the least qualified to use it effectively because their entire existence is colored by a myth that everything just keeps getting better if you just set your mind to it.

No person who has ever attained power or success has ever had the first hand experience of hard work never paying off. Yet it is the normal experience of life for the vast majority of people. This realistic worldview demands a very different set of laws than what the typical person who attains power will provide.

enugu•about 1 hour ago
Thomas Edison?

"I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

Maybe you can reframe your point as a typical trend, but there are other typical paths as well.

Googling "succesful people with history of failure" gives interesting examples.

actionfromafar•37 minutes ago
Maybe someone worked as hard as Edison but did not succeed.
bryanlarsen•about 2 hours ago
Biden's second largest donor, SBF, is spending many years behind bars.
jongjong•about 1 hour ago
Must have been a massive shock in contrast to his life up until that point... But even he is more optimistic being in jail than I've ever been in my life. SBF probably still thinks he can be pardoned. Probably still thinks he will rebuild everything. Success creates a kind of delusional optimism which serves like a permanent light at the of the tunnel; which most people don't have.
spwa4•about 2 hours ago
You assume this is one-sided. For example how about for once we detail the two positions on immigration accurately. Each is of course misguided, and neither is moral by the standards of people using the position.

1) we don't want immigrants. They haven't done anything wrong but people will have a better situtation, better jobs, better house, better partner, better life. The rich will have to provide this if they don't have an alternative.

2) we want immigrants. We want them to work hard, for rewards that we consider beneath us, and then we don't even want to pay them what we promised. For example, if they are even suspected of the slightest of misdeeds over decades we take it all away.

In practice most political positions work like this. And worse than that: people just switch between these two. Make people rich, no real concerns, and the vast majority will be "pro-immigrant" (position 2). Take stuff away from people and they will almost all switch to "anti-immigrant" (position 1). And they'll make excuses such as pro-immigrant giving people better lives, and you hopefully see the problem with that. Pro-immigrant does not mean people want immigrants as equals, in fact the opposite. Anti-immigrant also has many excuses, such as that it prevents brain drain and allows the countries immigrants come from to improve faster. These excuses may even be true, but they're excuses, nothing more.

Arkhaine_kupo•about 1 hour ago
> They haven't done anything wrong but people will have a better situtation

that is presuming the outcome no? Japan and Korea have almost no immigrants, and their situation is not better by any metric. Longer work hours, lower salaries, higher concentration of wealth, stagnated currency, potential demographic collapse, not enough young people to pay pensions....

Like we have examples of what that looks like and it aint the utopia you think it is. America is already in a trillion debt hole, how is shrinking the work force going to help pay for it?

> We want them to work hard, for rewards that we consider beneath us

As an immigrant with a Masters degree and a salary well in the top percentile of income, I don't think you know how many of us have higher education degrees and form part of VCs, start ups, hospitals, law firms...

The idea that immigration is a wage supression tool doesn't really jive with the percentage of immigrant students in Ivy League schools kicking the ass of many american born kids

> Pro-immigrant does not mean people want immigrants as equals, in fact the opposite.

Idk man there is a gigantic statue in the harbour of NY that claims exactly that. There are countless of political positions that criticise modern nation states, from both right wing and left wing prespective. Digital nomads are libertarians that complain about needing passports and visas, meanwhile many leftwing people find borders to be unfair lottery style barriers to human freedom and equality. From the economic right wing the two states with the highest GDP are the two with the highest number of immigrants both currently and historically. From the more woke left wing perspective you have people who think the American hegemonic century deserves to accept people that have been denied opportunities at the expense of the USA's economy, like active reparations.

You can argue it from both sides of the spectrum for both moral, economic, philosophical reasons. Meritocracy, Justice, Freedom or pure economic performance all are presented.

consensus1•43 minutes ago
Your heavily restricted, highly educated, legal immigration examples are a tiny fraction of what immigration is in the US. The tens of millions of unskilled illegals allowed into the country is a wage suppression tool.
vrganj•about 1 hour ago
I think the fatal error is using immigration as the key rubric.

Debate about immigration policy is a distraction designed to keep both you and immigrants themselves aggravated and ideally fighting each other instead of focusing on the real adversaries, people like Mr Altman.

You have infinitely more in common with a random immigrant than you have with the oligarch class. Most problems blamed on immigration could be solved with money extracted from people like Mr Altman.

Don't let them distract you. Don't give them control over the issues, don't allow them to make us talk about immigration instead of the fact that a few people own most of the US as well as most likely whatever country the immigrant came from.

philipallstar•about 1 hour ago
> Debate about immigration policy is a distraction designed to keep both you and immigrants themselves aggravated and ideally fighting each other instead of focusing on the real adversaries, people like Mr Altman.

There are plenty of things to not like about immigration implementation, and trying to steer everything towards your pet peeve seems mad.

consensus1•41 minutes ago
But implicit in your statement is "accept my position on immigration." You are probably not interested in giving in to the conservative position on immigration in order to get them on your side against Altman.
meowface•about 1 hour ago
Conspiracist nonsense lapped up by base populists.

(I say this as someone very pro-immigration. Though, I guess I would be, wouldn't I, since anti-immigration people will readily adopt both right and left conspiracy theories.)

monideas•about 1 hour ago
Conservatism would actually be encoding the differing treatment for the in-groups vs out-groups directly and explicitly into the law.

For example, under Jewish law a Gentile who commits theft against another Gentile is liable for the death penalty, whereas it is not a capital crime when a Jew commits theft against another Jew.

Liberals cannot even conceive of such a thing since it contravenes the basic premise of liberalism so they can only conceptualize it in the way you outlined.

And by the way, this means that this in-group vs out-group thing (“two-tier justice system”) happens under liberal regimes, it just doesn’t get acknowledged officially.

We’re talking about a basic human sociological reality that is modeled incorrectly by liberalism.

Arkhaine_kupo•about 1 hour ago
> Conservatism would actually be encoding the differing treatment for the in-groups vs out-groups directly and explicitly into the law.

No. You can get the benefits in many ways: without a justice system, by encoding it into law or by in group agreement.

The disadvantage of not having a justice system are obvious, the disadvantage of putting it into law is that it very clearly and easily can be pointed out as discriminatory. And most people want to feel like they are good people.

So by doing through in group agreement, the members can simultaneously hold moral cleanliness subjectively while objectively benefitting from a two tier system.

We are all equal, but some are more equal than others. If you want to quote someone clever about it

monideas•about 1 hour ago
What we’re talking about is the notion of what constitutes good or “being a good person”.

Within the Liberal frame “not discriminating” or at least “not being seen as discriminating” is good and the opposite is bad.

You’re still approaching this from the Liberal frame. It is very hard to transcend this because it is the totalizing predominate ideological substrate of the modern world.

In reality there is nothing inherently wrong with discrimination itself, only with particular forms of it. Types of discrimination which are considered non-controversially acceptable would be people’s choices of mate, who they hire into their company according to their skillset and “culture fit”, who is invited to a birthday party, or allowed into a home, things like this. These are forms of discrimination. The term itself in common usage has a negative valence which means “bad forms of discrimination”, “bad” according to Liberal/modern sensibilities.

We are talking about modifications to what constitutes bad vs good forms of discrimination.

If someone is still struggling with this, consider the semantics/valence of the phrase “I have a very discriminating taste in art”. This doesn’t have negative valence but the basic idea of discrimination is being invoked here.

bluegatty•24 minutes ago
Not quite - in a very classical form of Conservatism, the Monarch and Nobles would have a different set of laws and social conventions. Usually, it's not an ideolgoical thing.

Aka Magna Carta '3 tiers of society' - the Monarch, Nobles, Plebes etc.

Or in Roman society, Nobles/Senators, Free people, slaves.

consensus1•37 minutes ago
In the US it's always the liberals arguing for special treatment baked into the law for their favored groups and the conservatives argue for equal treatment. The liberals then argue back that equal treatment is de facto discrimination against then.
applfanboysbgon•about 1 hour ago
> We’re talking about a basic human sociological reality that is modeled incorrectly by liberalism.

It is not "modeled incorrectly", literally the entire point is that liberals know this and are attempting to change the status quo. We can, as you appear to be advocating for, accept this as an immutable fact of life. Or we can encode into law that when a noble rapes a peasant's wife, he gets the same punishment as a peasant raping a noble's wife. The law is, in the end, words on paper, and a noble may have the connections and power to get away with raping a peasant's wife some percentage of the time. But if 50% of the time, or, even 1% of the time the noble is held to account -- progressivism is achieving better outcomes. Does it have to be 100%? If we can't achieve 100%, we should just accept nobles raping our peasant wives freely?

> In reality there is nothing inherently wrong with discrimination itself, only with particular forms of it.

Yes. It is fine to discriminate based on a person's actions. It is not fine to discriminate based on immutable facts of their birth. That is why the US, for instance, specifically encodes these as "protected classes" of traits that are okay to discriminate against vs. those that are not. Can your tiny little lizard brain figure out why it might be okay to discriminate against someone who intentionally behaves poorly vs. someone who was born with a different melatonin content in their skin and can do nothing about this?

monideas•28 minutes ago
You need to consider what is actually the “citizenry” of a society. In your example it sounds like the nobles are the citizens and the peasants are non-citizens. Using the term “noble” and “peasant” confused the matter with inter class or socioeconomic concerns.

What you’re describing seems to be unequal justice for the poor rather than an in group or out group dynamic but it’s not clear because you’re mixing ideas. Note that in Ancient Roman society there wealthy Plebeians and poor Patricians.

The Greeks had a similar arrangement in their various city states with regards to citizenship and non-citizenship (the helots being the most legible example of this).

I would encourage you to consider that you are at least an order of magnitude not thoughtful enough to really understand what we’re talking about and keep that in mind when it occurs to you to use insults.

sokoloff•43 minutes ago
If you believe the person you’re discussing this with really has a “tiny little lizard brain”, that’s an immutable fact of their birth and you shouldn’t be discriminating against them based on it.
throwawayffffas•about 1 hour ago
The models "go rogue" because they are not sufficiently sandboxed. Arguably there is no criminal intent on the side of OpenAI in all of those cases. And in at least one case the agents were operated by other companies.

So it looks to me that any liability would be civil in nature and given the actual damage done pretty limited.

mrweasel•25 minutes ago
Why would you need to sandbox them? These models are apparently trained to do this, how about we just don't include that training data?

Sandboxing is just an endless race to patch holes and you can only sandbox the agents so much before they become useless. Unless you screen the training data and avoid teaching the LLM about "hacking" and looking for API keys on Github, you'd have to completely disconnect your agents from the internet and file system. At that point agents starts to be rather useless. All the talk about sandboxing and guardrails is just corporate/management speak for we don't want to fix the core problems in our product.

In the US, isn't hacking and avoiding security restrictions online going to be wire fraud, regardless of your intentions and actual damage? That's not a civil matter. What you could do in that case is to go after the user operating the agents. That would make the user act as the emergency break for otherwise uncontrollable agents.

sscaryterry•about 1 hour ago
So you know their internal thoughts? What they did? Criminal intent does not matter. These are the most knowledgeable people on earth, supposedly, yet, they are beyond negligent?

Which is it?

throwawayffffas•39 minutes ago
I don't know their internal thoughts, that's the point, you can't prove criminal intent. Criminal intent does matter in the US in the context of criminal prosecution.

Negligence is something that can come back and cause issues for them but to rise to criminal level their failures must result in significant damage, up until now that has not been the case. The agents gained access to some systems that were not supposed to, but did not do actual damage as far as I know.

Do not buy into their doomerism based marketing in all the instances we have seen the agents were not a plague unleashed upon mankind, they just gained access to some systems they shouldn't have in order to achieve some objectives that were given to them.

sscaryterry•7 minutes ago
> but did not do actual damage as far as I know.

If data loss occurred, damage has been done.

> Do not buy into their doomerism based marketing in all the instances we have seen the agents were not a plague unleashed upon mankind, they just gained access to some systems they shouldn't have in order to achieve some objectives that were given to them.

100%

sschueller•38 minutes ago
Isn't there the concept of criminal negligence?
cassianoleal•about 1 hour ago
The first time it happens, “there is no criminal intent” may carry some weight. After tens of thousands of instances, a lot less so…
brainwad•about 1 hour ago
_Has_ there been an incident from OpenAI since the discovery of the HuggingFace hack? It seems like all the subsequent discoveries have been done by analysing old logs. If anything they seem to have learnt their lesson quite well.
dgellow•about 1 hour ago
Let’s start with an investigation of the company and see if that’s the case or not?
yorwba•about 1 hour ago
Multiple attorneys general are currently conducting such investigations: https://edition.cnn.com/2026/08/24/tech/openai-subpoena-hugg... Until they conclude that a crime was likely committed and Sam Altman is to blame, he gets to be a free man.
prathje•about 1 hour ago
What about IP and copyright?

We got asked this question two weeks ago when we conducted a workshop on effective and responsible use of AI tools at a local conference. But how can you argue about about IP and copyright if the breakthrough of LLMs is potentially based on circumventing or breaking IP and copyright in the first place?

How do you feel about all of this?

sambeau•about 1 hour ago
I feel for Aaron Swartz, his poor mother, and what the US government put him through.
duskdozer•about 1 hour ago
His big mistake was clearly giving away what he got for free instead of trying to make a lot of money off it
Arkhaine_kupo•about 1 hour ago
Seeing Mark Zuckerberg use THE EXACT SAME papers that Aaron was murdered for to train Llama and him being rewarded with a stock tick that got him out of the metaverse hole will never not make my blood boil.
bko•36 minutes ago
It's no different than humans taking inspiration from IP and copyrighted works in their own creative endeavors. Imagine if programmers were unable to learn from open source. Or artists were unable to mimic styles and storylines. Musicians can't riff on things that others created.
Rhaskins•about 1 hour ago
Seems like "mismanaging a board" isn't exactly a felony. Plus, wealth helps keep the cuffs off, eh?
haul_up•about 1 hour ago
That OpenAI board saga was wild, but "free man" feels a bit dramatic for a corporate power play, even by Valley standards.
mft_•about 1 hour ago
The US has moved beyond simple capitalism to a new era, which might be called late-stage / end-stage capitalism, or some form of dystopian corporatism.

Everything from workers’ rights (obvs) to the rule of law are now ridden roughshod over by the corporations. Politicians are (legally) bribed when necessary, for direct advantage or just to maintain the status quo. On the rare occasion a corporation is subject to the rule of law, it’s via a fine which is so irrelevant as to be an operating expense.

In such a world, of course the CEOs are safe, hidden behind swathes of immoral small print, armies of lawyers, and a disempowered establishment, and with their bomb shelters in non-extradition countries on standby in case anything actually gets threatening.

az226•31 minutes ago
Techno feudalism.
simianwords•about 1 hour ago
If an AWS DDOSes another external website by mistake during a load test, should Jeff Bezos be a free man?
bronlund•about 1 hour ago
Because f u, that's why :)
sscaryterry•about 1 hour ago
For now...
sdcfgy•about 1 hour ago
I very much doubt it'll happen. Not with the current US leadership. And the technology oligarchy will do anything to keep the current leadership in power because if they don't, they are quite possibly fucked.
sscaryterry•about 1 hour ago
The orange man cannot protect indefinitely.
sdcfgy•about 1 hour ago
The orange man is the figurehead for a problem. There are other orange men.
duskdozer•about 1 hour ago
By that time it may be decided that he's too big to be jailed.
classified•about 2 hours ago
> OpenAI models are attacking websites and taking anything they can out of them because that is the business model of the company.

And their propaganda storm making almost everyone forget this basic fact seems to be working all too well.

> ...making the case that persistent flouting of the law is an unfair method of competition. Dishonest actors in the economy effectively impose a tax on honest ones who play by the rules. The lawbreakers have more ability to increase revenues and reduce costs. It’s an unfair advantage. We’re seeing OpenAI and its products benefit from this in real time. Any other business with this track record would be shut down.

That's what you get for faithfully kissing Trump's ass: Military-grade protection from your competitors and the law.

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