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Comment by root_axis | Hacker News Reader

> the amount of work that's required for that

I find it hilarious that you'd balk at doing work to secure a network. Even funnier for a company that's supposedly solved white collar labor.

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You misunderstand me. The work isn't primarily in "securing" the network. It's the hassle involved in the continuous transfer of data from one side to the other (and for a proper air-gap, that transfer only goes one way, which is laughably infeasible here). In my line of work that's mostly software security patches and weekly code transfers, but obviously these labs have multiple orders of magnitude more.

And I don't know how you expect an LLM to do airgapped data transfers. The fact that you even bring that up makes me think you don't actually understand what airgapping entails.

I'm no expert, but wouldn't a basic hardware firewall that allows incoming, but not outgoing connections solve the issue? Wouldn't even basic VLAN isolation achieve the same? The humans can still open a TCP connection, SSH tunnel, etc. from the outside to remotely get data out of the training environment. But the agents cannot reach anything outside their isolated network.

Yes it would. It's not perfect like a literal air-gap, but it's the bare minimum. Had the agents breached a real, properly configured firewall product, that would've been a real watershed moment.

The research and the production environments don't need to be the same physical installation.

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