In mid-July, as OpenAI was testing new artificial intelligence technologies, these unusually powerful systems broke out of their digital containers, found a path to the open internet and successfully hacked into a popular online service called Hugging Face.
For many researchers and other experts, the incident proved that A. I. technologies were growing increasingly dangerous and that the leading A. I. labs should maintain strict control over how these systems are used. Now, little more than a month later, a Chinese lab called Z.
ai is preparing to release similar A. I. technology as “open weight” software, which means anyone will be free to use the technology however they wish. The planned release on Friday of the new Chinese system, called GLM 5. 3, will cut to the heart of a debate that has roiled A. I.
researchers for years. Although many experts believe that the latest A. I. technologies are too dangerous to openly share with the public, others argue that open sharing is the safest path forward.
“Open weight models have a very important part to play,” said Dan Lahav, chief executive of Irregular, a cybersecurity company whose technologies have been used by OpenAI to test new A. I. systems.
The disclosure that OpenAI’s technologies had unexpectedly hacked into Hugging Face, a digital library popular among software developers, confirmed what cybersecurity experts have been saying for months: The leading A. I.
systems are now shockingly good at identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities in computer software. In other words, they can streamline and accelerate cyberattacks. We are having trouble retrieving the article content. Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber. Log in. Want all of The Times. Subscribe.