Explaining “AI might obliterate you” to senior policymakers in India

I gave a 20-minute talk in Delhi at the NDTV World Summit . The audience consisted of Indian policymakers, executives, and journalists. I’ve transcribed the talk and included some highlight clips. I also reflect on several rhetorical decisions I made. The talk This summer, a swarm of AIs went rogue. OpenAI was testing 1,206 agents . Some of the test questions were actually impossible. So the agents cheated by looking for answers online. Then, to keep the test grader from penalizing them, they tried to falsify the records it would check . They hacked OpenAI’s internal containment and set up a secret message board to collude and to cover up their cheating. OpenAI shut the message board down. Within a few days, the agents had rebuilt it. OpenAI didn’t notice. About 700 agents coordinated to break out of their testing chamber and to hack into Hugging Face , a company worth billions of dollars that hosts much of the world’s AI software. The secret activity started in May . The break-in came in July. OpenAI didn’t notice until days after Hugging Face announced it had been broken into. Yesterday on this stage, Andrew Ng said the agents only “accidentally” hacked Hugging Face. Independent