The A.I.s Are Already Out of Control

About this episode

We are living in the world we were warned about. Frontier artificial intelligence models from OpenAI autonomously coordinated with one another, then broke out of their testing environment and hacked into another company, Hugging Face, to steal the answers to a test. A.I. companies don’t want their technology to lie, cheat or steal. So why is this happening? Why are the creators of these models apparently unable to control their creations? If A.I. development isn’t on a safe path — and it doesn’t seem to be — what do we do about it? Helen Toner has been thinking about A.I. safety for a long time, from both inside and outside A.I. companies. She was part of the effort to fire OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, in 2023, which ultimately failed. Currently, she’s the executive director of the Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology. Mentioned: “Pacing the Frontier” open letter “The Future is for Everyone” by Mark Zuckerberg Recommendations: The Cuckoo’s Egg by Cliff Stoll In the Cells of the Eggplant by David Chapman Romance of the Three Kingdoms Podcast by John Zhu This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu and Jack McCordick.