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Comment by nemomarx | Hacker News Reader

Here is one thing I don't get - the model is only "running" if it's being kept going by some harness that is basically giving it prompts it's generating itself. Shouldn't kill switches be pretty easy to build into the software and hardware for this? and you would even have a better time dumping logs and analyzing things if you froze those processes any time something strange happened in testing, surely?

So why do the big frontier labs not have something like this anyway. They're talking about two week pauses on the new model (which seems very short and hardly a cost at all to me) and alarms during their tests that might be 30 minutes late and etc. Those are not very serious measures, so are they not concerned?

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> Shouldn't kill switches be pretty easy to build

I need to remember when I comment here that these are the kinds of people I am replying to. Just oozing with hubris.

No, kill switches are not easy to build and the latest incident should have made it clear that AI can go undetected, evade, zero day, and spread.

The fact that this incident happened greatly increases the probability it happens again and/or is already happening elsewhere.

Why aren't they? You could put a human yes/ no prompt before any cycle the agent is running on, or not let it spawn sub processes, or anything like that. Why let it run autonomously enough that it can no longer have a simple way to completely stop it? (obviously not practical to do this during real use, but for evals? you could slow it down in lots of ways I would think)

Are you telling me we've been iterating on this for years and for convenience we just let the models call any tools or spawn any other model instances they like, and there was no design for harnesses that could control this done during that time?

They aren't interrupted by humans because that would slow things down.

> Are you telling me we've been iterating on this for years and for convenience we just let the models call any tools or spawn any other model instances they like

Yes exactly.

> there was no design for harnesses that could control this done during that time

You could but no one wants that. You need to separate your imagination from reality. Just because something can be done in your head doesn't mean it's happening.

It's so easy, except it isn't because you don't control the actions of anyone or anything.

They are, we're just dealing with tech workers that don't have ethics nor do they actually care if their work is harmful (see all the FAANG workers at American corporations, some of the most evil entities on the planet.

It's just that they don't care, as you said these are entirely made human systems. The idea that we can't write better software is both selfish and laughable.

> kill switches are not easy to build

We've had circuit breakers for nearly a century.

And a circuit breaker has nothing to do with shutting AI off. What a strange comment.

It literally does.

>I need to remember when I comment here that these are the kinds of people I am replying to.

People who dont buy into fantasism?

You need to read the AI safety stuff from the people that you say are from 2010. There are plenty of good arguments on why kill switches will never work.

AI is already being heavily used in cyber warfare by governments. You think they want easy to break systems when 'enemy' AI will most certainly attack that first? We'll find over time that agentic systems get harder and harder to 'kill' because allowing any AI on the internet that is easy to kill will get it DDOSed.

Also building it into software is nearly useless as AI can write and make software. Just replace and kill your loop with theirs. It's kind of odd talking about them like they are living things, but it's all stuff people have already thought off and stuffed their training data full of.

My perspective is that you shouldn't make systems past the complexity where you can do this at all. Why have them be autonomous? Why have one that can independently ask researchers things or try to convince it's way out of a sandbox, or etc? Why allow it to execute scripts or call tools or push any code anywhere?

If you couldn't make those things happen securely you should not advance to that stage at all. The simplest ai safety was always just "don't build it" really, instead of worrying about alignment.

Humans, it seems, are a suicidal bunch. We'll gladly build the "if you build it, everyone dies machine" If we think there is money, glory, or power on the other side for us.

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