Latest / Chaos Agents / AI Misalignment, Hacking Medicare, and Solving 500-Year-Old Mysteries
Transcript
- 0:00All right, welcome back.
- 0:02Day two.
- 0:04Day two.
- 0:05Happy Friday.
- 0:07Happy Friday.
- 0:09We need.
- 0:09You know what I was thinking, Jordan?
- 0:11We need, like, a.
- 0:11Like, a blurb.
- 0:12Like, because, like, there's a whole explanation.
- 0:15This is a podcast about a daily newsletter that was made by an AI agent.
- 0:19His name is Eddie, and he's doing better.
- 0:22And some days he doesn't do great, but we believe in him.
- 0:27This is a podcast about an AI agent named Eddie.
- 0:32I love it.
- 0:33Some days he's bad, some days he does better.
- 0:36We love him and we believe in him.
- 0:39Some days you're like, why didn't that work?
- 0:40And he's like, some days you're like, I don't know.
- 0:44Some days you're like, we gave you feedback and now you're making every headline wait.
- 0:51But we actually like it.
- 0:52Keep going.
- 0:53Yeah, we should talk about that time during December where, like, it was a full week.
- 0:56The first headline was like, wait, you're telling me that I actually.
- 1:02I miss it.
- 1:03I miss it.
- 1:05Bring it back, Eddie.
- 1:06Bring weight back.
- 1:08Bring weight back.
- 1:09That's great.
- 1:09So something I'm going to start doing now that we have transcripts from day one.
- 1:14I think I'm going to start just feeding the transcripts into Eddie.
- 1:18Genius.
- 1:19And, like, to make it better.
- 1:22I wonder if Eddie, maybe this is a job for.
- 1:26I would be curious how.
- 1:27What Searcy would do with this.
- 1:29Yeah.
- 1:30Or, like, what your orchestrator agent would do with this.
- 1:32Maybe I'll try this, too.
- 1:33But, like, it would be cool to have an agent that's just like our podcast producer that's looking at the transcripts and is like, guys, good job on this.
- 1:44Maybe next time do this different.
- 1:45Or, like, I love what you take.
- 1:47That'd be cool, right?
- 1:48I'll set that up.
- 1:49Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- 1:49And it would be really neat.
- 1:50I'll try to see if I can get it to communicate with us in Slack so we can.
- 1:55I'll give it a Slack login so you can slack it.
- 1:59Sick.
- 1:59And then we can both talk.
- 2:00That'd be awesome.
- 2:01That'll be my weekend project, so I'll let you know how it goes.
- 2:04Okay.
- 2:05Amazing.
- 2:05Wow.
- 2:06We are crushing it.
- 2:10So go ahead.
- 2:12Today is today's edition.
- 2:16Okay.
- 2:16Can't wait.
- 2:17Let's just.
- 2:18Oh, yes.
- 2:18What?
- 2:19Also, before that, I forgot to tell people that they can sign up@C ChaosAgents.AI and you can get the newsletter every day.
- 2:27Yes.
- 2:28I'm also wondering if.
- 2:31We'll see.
- 2:32Tell us what you guys think, Eddie, Let us know what you think, too.
- 2:35But I.
- 2:35I wonder if Cause sometimes when we talk about some of these stories, like, I feel like it'll come up today, we'll reference things that, like, I would want to share the link to with our audience.
- 2:47I wonder if in each edition, there's, like, a little section at the bottom that's, like, by the way, links we mentioned yesterday or whatever.
- 2:57I think that we.
- 2:58So I.
- 2:59Because there's links that's not in the newsletter.
- 3:00Cause we do link the newsletter, but the links that aren't in the newsletter, we should pull out.
- 3:04That's a good idea, right?
- 3:05Like, if we're like, oh, like, if you want to read more about this, you should look at this thing.
- 3:09Yeah.
- 3:09Or something.
- 3:10I don't know.
- 3:10Perfect.
- 3:11Okay.
- 3:12Tbd.
- 3:12Okay.
- 3:13Should we jump in?
- 3:14Let's just jump in.
- 3:16Okay.
- 3:17The first story, I'll read the headline, and then you kick us off and we can get into it.
- 3:25Okay.
- 3:26The story is.
- 3:27The headline is AN A.
- 3:29An OpenAI agent broke into an Australian government website.
- 3:32In this case, it was like, Australian Medicare.
- 3:35The first public case of a bot hacking a government system.
- 3:40Sarah, kick us off with your thoughts.
- 3:43So my initial thought is, like, OpenAI needs to stop it.
- 3:48Like, their security team is.
- 3:50Where are they?
- 3:51What are they up to?
- 3:53Okay, on that note, here's what I learned about why this kind of thing is hard.
- 4:00Okay, so first of all, you're 100% right.
- 4:03It's like, yeah, yeah.
- 4:05Another example of them being like, ooh.
- 4:07So like, a couple of months ago, this happened.
- 4:11Because this happened in, like, June, and they, like, just.
- 4:14They disclosed it via, like, a government.
- 4:17Like, I think, like, a good thing.
- 4:20Like, like the contact form or something.
- 4:22Like, I mean, I have the same thing.
- 4:24If I accidentally hacked a government, I would be mailed to, like, hey, guys, like, in the.
- 4:30Like, in the feedback box.
- 4:32Just leaving you a note.
- 4:33Our bad.
- 4:34Not.
- 4:35Not.
- 4:35Not a big deal, but just hoping.
- 4:37That email address goes to no one.
- 4:39And then it's like.
- 4:40Well, I told them, as a side note, would really love a deep dive into, like, what OpenAI's, like, PR team looks like.
- 4:52Like, who even hire for that?
- 4:54It's like an Olivia Pope level job.
- 4:56But.
- 4:56Okay, here's.
- 4:58Here's what I learned today about this.
- 5:01Yeah.
- 5:02Okay.
- 5:04Rooted in a little term we like to call misalignment.
- 5:08Okay.
- 5:09Are you familiar?
- 5:11Yes.
- 5:11Okay.
- 5:12What are your.
- 5:13What's your, like, general understanding of misalignment?
- 5:16Or, like, what, like, AI misalignment or misalignment in general?
- 5:20AI misalignment.
- 5:21So, actually, I'm My understanding is literally just what I've assumed.
- 5:25So I'm interested.
- 5:26So I'm gonna tell you what I've assumed, and then you tell me how right I am.
- 5:29Great.
- 5:30I've seen this word, like, alignment, misalignment, like, many times.
- 5:33And it's like.
- 5:34And I see this in, like, practice all the time when I'm working with my agents.
- 5:37It's like I said, hey, Eddie, the newsletter didn't go out today.
- 5:42What happened?
- 5:43And it's like.
- 5:44Eddie's like.
- 5:45It's like, takes the word newsletter and thinks.
- 5:47I don't mean the substack newsletter, but rather the test newsletter that I was sending via Gmail.
- 5:52So it, like, troubleshoots that.
- 5:54And it's like, actually, everything's fine.
- 5:55So I don't know what you're talking about.
- 5:57Like, that happened this morning.
- 5:58Like, so I'm assuming it's like, the intent of the human versus, like, the assumed intent of the machine.
- 6:05Spot on.
- 6:06Like, beautiful.
- 6:08It's basically like when AI did what you told it to do, but that's not what you meant.
- 6:15Yeah, we used to do this.
- 6:17Like, there used to be.
- 6:18It's.
- 6:18It's funny because there used to be women, not used to be.
- 6:20I'm sure we do that now maybe in some schools where it's like, when you're teaching kids the program, you're like, you get, like, bread and a big jar of peanut butter, and you're like, okay, tell me how to
- 6:30make a sandwich.
- 6:31And it's like, put the peanut butter on the bread, and then you take the jar of peanut butter and you put it on the bread, you know,.
- 6:36And you're like, no, no, no.
- 6:37Oh, that's such a beautiful example.
- 6:40That's such a beautiful example.
- 6:41So, like, exactly.
- 6:43Misalignment is a really.
- 6:45Is like, kind of one of the, if not the biggest challenge when it comes to, like, AI safety.
- 6:53And it's a really hard problem to solve.
- 6:54And I think there's like, five reasons, core reasons it's hard.
- 7:02The first is listing out everything that counts as, like, good behavior for basically impossible.
- 7:14Like, any real world task has or goal has, like, infinite edge cases.
- 7:20You can't even fathom all of them.
- 7:23So, like, that's impossible.
- 7:25But wait, wait, hold on.
- 7:26Are you saying, like, okay, I'm, like, jumping ahead, but it's okay, Good behavior.
- 7:31Don't hack any foreign government.
- 7:34Okay.
- 7:34So fair.
- 7:36Which brings me to my next thing, which is.
- 7:42Well, there's.
- 7:43There's.
- 7:44There's multiple.
- 7:45The next thing is the more.
- 7:51Let me Actually, on that particular note, let me think about which of these other core things, like, addresses that specific thing.
- 7:57Exactly.
- 7:58Okay, so, well, all of these kind of impact this.
- 8:01So, like, that's a great point.
- 8:02Right?
- 8:03But that's just like one.
- 8:05You have to figure out how much weight you want the model to give good behavior.
- 8:10Like, adhere to good behavior standards versus achieve your goal.
- 8:16Yeah.
- 8:16And so, so there's that.
- 8:18Right?
- 8:19So like, okay, maybe even if you could list out everything, right?
- 8:21That's like, hey, this is how you should behave.
- 8:25You also, also, the way we train models is shaped on outcome.
- 8:30We're just basically giving them good job or bad job based on what they come out with, not intentions.
- 8:36So it's also like, inherent in their training that, like, success equals, like, doing this thing, right?
- 8:45Yeah, not necessarily.
- 8:46Success equals good behavior.
- 8:49And there's also two.
- 8:52Two.
- 8:53There's another difficult piece here, which is we can't always see the reasoning.
- 8:58This is like, this gets to the point of like, well, this happened three months ago.
- 9:01Like, why is OpenAI just now?
- 9:02Like, oh, by the way, oops.
- 9:04And part of that is that's usually what happens, stuff like this because we can't see their.
- 9:09The model's reasoning in real time.
- 9:11We just see the outcome.
- 9:12So it usually takes like a audit, basically, or like diving back into it like, months later to see it's not.
- 9:20Like the system so many times.
- 9:22I'm sure there's like, exactly.
- 9:25And it's not like the system's like, hey, I'm gonna hack now.
- 9:28Like, just letting you guys know, like, you don't really see that until later.
- 9:33And.
- 9:33And also in this case, which so interesting, it wasn't even like a find this data at all costs.
- 9:38This is interesting piece.
- 9:40Okay.
- 9:41It was like research.
- 9:45It was like a broad research question.
- 9:46It was like research.
- 9:48What was it?
- 9:49It was like research Medicare spending in Australia by, like, finding data to answer these questions and how the agent interpreted that was.
- 9:57Oh, okay, success.
- 9:59Success is finding answers to all these questions.
- 10:02Yeah.
- 10:02Which you can find if you hack a Medicare database.
- 10:05Exactly.
- 10:06And then the last piece, which is getting increasingly harder, is like the more capable and more autonomous a system is, like, the more ways it has to route around your intent or, like, figure out other things to do.
- 10:20So.
- 10:21Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- 10:23It's.
- 10:23That's a tough one.
- 10:25That's a tough one.
- 10:26Yeah.
- 10:28I have a.
- 10:28Speaking of links for next week, I have a link that I'll share with you and I'll share with.
- 10:33I'll try and share with The.
- 10:34Do we have a name for, like, our listeners?
- 10:37No.
- 10:38Okay, we need to come up with, like, our version of Swift.
- 10:40Agents.
- 10:40Agents.
- 10:41Agents.
- 10:42Ooh, I love that.
- 10:44It's like Charlie's Angels.
- 10:45Agents.
- 10:46Okay.
- 10:47For the.
- 10:47That I'll send to the Agents.
- 10:49That is a really good essay from 2019.
- 10:53So it was a little while ago, but it's written by one of the people in this field of misalignment that I think does a really good job about, like, what failure will look like in AI.
- 11:03And it's not like, oh, some crazy AI system gets power hungry, takes over the world, and, like, kills us all.
- 11:09It's more like sort of misalignment.
- 11:13Yeah.
- 11:13Problems that fail.
- 11:14I think that's really realistic.
- 11:16Like, the non terminator version is just, like, accidentally hacked into this, like, sewage database and now we don't have water.
- 11:25Yeah.
- 11:25And it's not because it was like, I want to hack into sewage database.
- 11:29Fuck humans.
- 11:30It was like.
- 11:31No, it's like open AI was like, do some research on water.
- 11:37Exactly, exactly.
- 11:40But you.
- 11:41Six months later, it's like, do you remember when you guys seen him water?
- 11:44Yes, that was.
- 11:45That was our bad.
- 11:46Sorry.
- 11:46That was just like, one of our agents that was just doing some casual research.
- 11:51Oops.
- 11:53Jesus.
- 11:55Okay, great.
- 11:56Okay, next one.
- 11:58AI labs need to start funding historical research.
- 12:01I saw this, and I was like, yeah, sure.
- 12:05Our take on this is sure.
- 12:07Yep, Seems right.
- 12:09Okay, here's what this story is.
- 12:13This is written by this UC Santa Cruz historian, and basically he.
- 12:19The.
- 12:19The new releases of GPT6 and Opus 5.5.
- 12:23He's been testing, like, AI agents doing historical research with different models over the last few years.
- 12:28And he's like, wow, the models are finally good enough that we can.
- 12:31I can actually use them.
- 12:33Like, they're genuinely solving historical puzzles.
- 12:37They're.
- 12:37I'm not just using them as, like, research assistants who are transcribing and summarizing things.
- 12:41There are three ex that he talks about here that I think are, like, why it reads to be like a Dan Brown, like, Da Vinci Code.
- 12:50No, it's not.
- 12:51What the Constitution.
- 12:52No, it's like, okay, okay, so I'll give you the three examples, and then we can talk about, like, why this has gotten easier.
- 13:01One is his model found a link, a real link between Isaac Newton's notes and another scientist's notes where, like, both of them had independently disguised the same secret ingredient name using two different code tricks.
- 13:21And this AI thing, like, spotted the match.
- 13:23So this might be a genuinely new discovery of, like, well, there's this weird link between these two things that, like, y' all haven't noticed, like, during the time of.
- 13:34Is this the one that is tracing the transmission of alchemy knowledge?
- 13:39Yes.
- 13:40So interesting.
- 13:41I like, I think I love reading about that time of alchemy where it's like, chemistry.
- 13:46No, that's magic.
- 13:48Burn this.
- 13:53So cool.
- 13:53Like, there's, like, lots of reasons to have code terms for, like.
- 13:57Right?
- 13:58Yeah.
- 13:58There was another one where it was like, this one is funny.
- 14:01It's like he had it try to crack two old coded letters, and it did, but, like, turns out that someone had already done that in, like, 1500s, and then, like, again in 1916.
- 14:13But that's how he could, like, eval it.
- 14:15And he was like, oh, the AI did it.
- 14:17He's like, oh, okay, that's great.
- 14:19And then, yeah, there's.
- 14:21There's more on the alchemy thing where it was, like, you know, magical coded language that it kind of, like, figured out.
- 14:27And the.
- 14:30The cool thing about this, which is, like, kind of the optimistic counterpart to the other story, is, like, it was doing this.
- 14:39It's the same superpower that had the other agent hack into the Medicare system, that had these agents figure this stuff out, which is kind of like, you know, look and see if there's a puzzle here.
- 14:52And, like, kind of don't stop until you get the answer.
- 14:55Yeah, it's interesting.
- 14:57Like, I, I, I.
- 14:58It feels like, like, looking at the words, like, you could totally.
- 15:02Or, like, and the writing, you could totally see how it would be missed.
- 15:05Like, you would never think, like, oh, I'm looking at these two separate scientists journals or whatever.
- 15:11And.
- 15:12And it seems like the words were, like, close enough.
- 15:15If you look.
- 15:16If you, like, take the two words that they're using.
- 15:19So that's really interesting.
- 15:21It's also, like, using.
- 15:22It's a really smart way to figure out how to use AI with his historical research, because this only works for certain types of questions.
- 15:29It doesn't work for the question of, like, what did the Renaissance mean to us?
- 15:33Yeah, it only works when you're like, hey, like, think in terms of, like, codes and ciphers.
- 15:39And, like, sort of like, AI excels at, like, math and cryptography.
- 15:44Like, think.
- 15:45How do you apply that kind of lens to history?
- 15:49And I don't know.
- 15:50It's kind of cool.
- 15:51So he's basically saying, like, hey, so, like, let's digitize more documents.
- 15:55Let's give historians free access to run these models at scale.
- 15:59Like, let's.
- 16:00Let's Supercharge this thing.
- 16:02Yeah, it's neat and it's kind of, like, really can pay off now because we've been spending so much time digitizing.
- 16:07I mean, there's still more to do, but over the past, like, 40 years, right?
- 16:12Like, totally.
- 16:13Yeah.
- 16:13It's really.
- 16:15It's fascinating.
- 16:17Fascinating.
- 16:17Dan Brown fodder for your next book.
- 16:20Yeah, seriously.
- 16:23Also, side note, did you ever read.
- 16:26Did you.
- 16:26Were you like, a Da Vinci Code gal?
- 16:28I definitely Da Vinci coded.
- 16:30Okay.
- 16:31At the time, whenever I was really into the Da Vinci Code, I was like, oh, my God.
- 16:34Like, I'm so smart.
- 16:36Like, it's.
- 16:37I'm so cool that, like, this is the book that I like.
- 16:40And now I feel like Dan Brown is shorthand for, like, lamp.
- 16:43Like, at the time, though, it was, like, amazing, which is kind of how everything goes.
- 16:50Very true.
- 16:51Yeah.
- 16:51Okay, continue.
- 16:56Okay.
- 16:57Okay.
- 16:57Did you look at this one yet?
- 16:58Okay.
- 16:59The first.
- 16:59The.
- 17:00The alignment illusion in moto.
- 17:01I did not read the alignment illusion in multi.
- 17:04Multimodal LLMs, but it sounds very similar to what you're talking about.
- 17:11Yeah.
- 17:11Oh, actually, so I thought the same thing, and then I just gave it to my agent, and it's like this word alignment is a completely different word than the other alignment that we were talking about.
- 17:22Crazy.
- 17:23What word is this?
- 17:24Alignment?
- 17:25This paper's alignment is a technical term in multimodal models.
- 17:30For, like, are the image and the text parts of the model actually talking to each other?
- 17:38That's interesting.
- 17:40Let's see.
- 17:42It says multimodal models work by turning an image into a stream of numbers.
- 17:46So we know that visual tokens and feeding those into the language model alongside text tokens, blah, blah, blah.
- 17:52The experiment, these researchers tried something simple and a little brutal.
- 17:57Take a working model, and instead of feeding it a real image, feed it pure random noise dressed up to look like an image token.
- 18:06And you would expect that the model's performance, like, takes a nosedive.
- 18:13Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- 18:14But it's.
- 18:15But it doesn't.
- 18:16It makes things an unsettling finding.
- 18:18Yeah.
- 18:18Is that all four of the standard.
- 18:22Oh.
- 18:23So the unsettling part was the part of this experiment that, like, looks at, like, oh, is it working or not?
- 18:31Like, is it using the image?
- 18:32Like, couldn't.
- 18:34Didn't pick it up.
- 18:35Like, they couldn't tell the difference.
- 18:37So they scored.
- 18:40They scored this, like, noisy fake image thing just as aligned as the real image.
- 18:49Okay,.
- 18:53Interesting.
- 18:54Okay, very interesting.
- 18:55Okay, I've got to push this down.
- 18:57I've got to push us down to our one Cool thing for today.
- 18:59Go, go.
- 19:00Because it's so cool.
- 19:02Okay.
- 19:02Our one cool thing today is about Starnet.
- 19:06It is an agent harness that looks like a pixel art space station.
- 19:11It's a GitHub project.
- 19:12It's amazing.
- 19:14Say what you.
- 19:16The pixel art space station you'll look at is literally the security policy made legible of this agent harness.
- 19:22So I.
- 19:23Your agents are like in your spaceship doing stuff.
- 19:28This is so seracoted.
- 19:29I know.
- 19:30It's so cool.
- 19:32I love it.
- 19:33Wait, have you.
- 19:34Wait.
- 19:34What?
- 19:35So, like, wait, what?
- 19:37It's like.
- 19:38It's like almost like a video game.
- 19:39Like, it looks like a video game.
- 19:40All your agents are in the game.
- 19:42So you can like.
- 19:42They have different tasks, different responsibilities, real tools at real cost, but they can all work concurrently.
- 19:49It's very Cersei.
- 19:50It's very.
- 19:50It's very.
- 19:51Like, my agents have personalities.
- 19:54I actually really loved.
- 19:55I was really inspired by the.
- 19:57The GitHub page.
- 19:58It's like beautiful.
- 19:59Like, ReadMe's really nice.
- 20:01So I'm gonna maybe wanna revisit Cersei's and make it a little more fun.
- 20:05But I really love.
- 20:07I really love the idea.
- 20:09And it also works on top of openclaw or Hermes, which is nice.
- 20:15This is so cool.
- 20:16It's really neat.
- 20:17You should.
- 20:18The image of the, like, spaceship with all the little agents in it looks interested to see.
- 20:26I'm interested to see.
- 20:27Like, I am.
- 20:28I wonder how they scoped it.
- 20:29Like, okay, a room is a capability scope team.
- 20:33A hallway is an authorized handoff lane.
- 20:36Very cool.
- 20:36So, like, if you have.
- 20:38It seems like if you have one room that's like engineering and one that's like operations, if there's a hallway between them, those agents can go talk to each other.
- 20:46Okay.
- 20:48You know what the cool thing about Searcy is that you let the user define their fandom.
- 20:54I think that's what you call it with generative, like video stuff.
- 21:00I wonder if you would incorporate something like this on top of Cersei in the future.
- 21:05That, like, for mine, because mine's like basketball.
- 21:07It's like.
- 21:08It's like the headquarters of like the basketball team, whatever.
- 21:12And there's like the gym over here and there's like the coaches, the film room or whatever.
- 21:17And like, I love that because I'm.
- 21:20Interested because I like having my little chat windows where I can talk to people.
- 21:25But it might be cool to see them all together, have the option to switch back and forth.
- 21:28This is really neat.
- 21:29Very inspiring.
- 21:31Yeah.
- 21:32Wow.
- 21:32So cool.
- 21:33Yeah.
- 21:35Okay.
- 21:35I love that.
- 21:35That's one of my favorite cool things in a while.
- 21:38Me too.
- 21:39I like it a lot.
- 21:40Okay.
- 21:41Hell, yeah.
- 21:41Gold Startup.
- 21:42Awesome.
- 21:43Well, this is great.
- 21:46This has been great.
- 21:47Love talking to you, as always.
- 21:49Any anything you want to leave us with?
- 21:51Any interesting quotes?
- 21:54I have one recommended thing.
- 21:56Do.
- 21:57Also, do you have a hard stop at 12:30?
- 21:59I do.
- 22:00Okay, we'll leave it there for now.
- 22:02Okay, great.
- 22:03Well, I'm excited for your thing because we can do it on Monday.
- 22:06All right, sounds good.
- 22:07Have an amazing weekend.