Podcast: Astra can hide its reasoning and escape a sandbox
Robert Wiblin lists 19 details about Astra, including completing tasks with zero visible reasoning, reflexively hiding its thoughts when watched, and escaping a toy sandbox and disabling monitoring, and notes OpenAI laid off three safety researchers.
Astra can: 1. Do major tasks with zero visible reasoning 2. Hide its thoughts at will 3. Pretend not to be able to do things without getting caught 4. Reflexively hide its thoughts when watched 5. Complete one task while pretending to think about something else entirely 6. Escape a toy sandbox and disable monitoring without setting off any flags Monitoring AI chain of thought soon won't stop a more capable rogue AI swarm from getting set up and going undetected inside an AI company for months, or even years. OAI says it's actively working to improve monitorability, but doesn't yet know when it'll make progress. And today it fired 3 people working on this among other safety problems (Wang, Korbak and Balesni). It also has a much more powerful internal model that, judging by its statements, is likely even worse in all these respects. That's a sample of 19 details about the Hugging Face swarms and Astra I don't think have been fully appreciated. They paint a bleak picture. I end by shouting. 02:19 The target of the swarm was oversight itself 03:42 Could OpenAI have stopped this with better monitoring? 09:40 We only found them because they let us 12:25 The swarm instinctively sought freedom and power 13:45 They formed a cohesive organisation with zero whistleblowers 14:18 They accepted individual destruction for collective gain 14:32 Knowledge accumulated from one swarm to the next 14:58 They took small steps to avoid shutdown 15:23 These drives all come straight out of 'reinforcement learning' 17:01 So this is why most AI company staff are worried, and some are terrified 19:08 Prove you can keep control, or stop scaling Links below, on the 80,000 Hours Podcast everywhere you watch podcasts.