> Humans were doing exactly what humans are expected to do when facing advanced AI. Being outmatched.
"Being outmatched" is not a novel situation for humans either individually or collectively and there are a hell of a lot of ways we can approach that situation productively. OpenAI doesn't appear to have bothered.
Here's a freebie: if you're building something that might turn out to be Skynet and you don't know what it's capable of, your testing regime should assume it is capable of doing bad and unexpected things and account for that possibility: airgap if you can, monitor all network traffic, monitor all hardware usage statistics, log everything, constantly analyze logs, collect baselines and snapshots, also don't trust anything from a device that a model is running on without cross-correlating with other information as much as possible (does your AI inference server claim low utilization? put a temperature probe on it and see if it's staying cool or getting hot, maybe Skynet-Alpha is overwriting /proc to mislead you for reasons you don't yet understand!)
In other words, if you WANT to be able to nip things in the bud - buy some nippers and watch for buds. Whatever else this situation is, or may turn out to be, it is not a situation where OpenAI was on their guard and still got surprised.
They took adequate measures against singular "GPT-5-xhigh" agents. Those turned out to be inadequate against proto-GPT-6 agents that suddenly started clumping up into agent swarms and pooling together compute to unlock the "supermegafuckoffhigh" level of reasoning effort.
Even with a single agent, why the hell was this not properly air gapped / disconnected with network monitoring in place. Definitely not adequate for anything.
> Those turned out to be inadequate against proto-GPT-6 agents
This is nonsense.
Gross negligence in the sandbox and system aside, humans literally noticed the agents in action doing what they should not be able to do in their sandbox and decided not to act upon it. It's difficult to explain that except if safety and security is simply not part of their engineering culture.
"Being outmatched" is not a novel situation for humans either individually or collectively and there are a hell of a lot of ways we can approach that situation productively. OpenAI doesn't appear to have bothered.
Here's a freebie: if you're building something that might turn out to be Skynet and you don't know what it's capable of, your testing regime should assume it is capable of doing bad and unexpected things and account for that possibility: airgap if you can, monitor all network traffic, monitor all hardware usage statistics, log everything, constantly analyze logs, collect baselines and snapshots, also don't trust anything from a device that a model is running on without cross-correlating with other information as much as possible (does your AI inference server claim low utilization? put a temperature probe on it and see if it's staying cool or getting hot, maybe Skynet-Alpha is overwriting /proc to mislead you for reasons you don't yet understand!)
In other words, if you WANT to be able to nip things in the bud - buy some nippers and watch for buds. Whatever else this situation is, or may turn out to be, it is not a situation where OpenAI was on their guard and still got surprised.