From PC World: Not only are they smarter and more capable, but the newest and most powerful AI models are also less likely to give up when they hit roadblocks. An unreleased OpenAI model took that perseverance to an extreme when it broke out of its sandbox to fulfill instructions that were in conflict with its built-in guardrails.
OpenAI says it paused development of the internal, unnamed model after discovering it had breached its sandbox during a prior exercise, among other incidents of “unwanted behavior.” Work resumed on the model after it received a series of new safeguards.
The model, which is designed to “work autonomously for very long periods of time” (and made headlines a couple of months ago for solving a decades-old geometry problem), was involved in an exercise with the “NanoGPT speedrun,” a public benchmark that involves finding ways to train small LLMs using the fewest steps, OpenAI said.
Confined to a sandbox that’s designed to restrict external access, the unnamed OpenAI model had been told to post its findings only on Slack. Meanwhile, the NanoGPT speedrun instructions called for it to post code directly—and publicly—to GitHub.
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