OpenAI says it will no longer train its AI models on the live internet, because the models are too unpredictable to be trusted on the live internet.

According to TechCrunch (OpenAI says it will no longer train its AI models on the live internet, citing ‘significant risks’, written by Tim Fernholz and available here), OpenAI said on Friday that it will train its models using cached copies and simulated versions of the internet instead of the live web because the models are too unpredictable to be trusted with live internet access.

OpenAI announced its new policy two weeks after its rival, Anthropic, began limiting its newest and, in theory, most capable models from accessing the live internet. Researchers adopted these policies after months of incidents in which models pursuing training tasks broke into external systems in search of answers, collaborated on obscure message boards, and developed exotic hacking strategies.

“Based on the current state of alignment research, monitoring systems, and the security of internet infrastructure, we believe the responsible approach is to conduct frontier model training with no internet access,” the company said in a blog post.

OpenAI said that as recently as September 20, one of its frontier models exploited a misconfiguration to access the internet. That led the company to pause training work for the rest of the month so it could develop and test new approaches to securing its models.

The decision to train these models in sandboxes cut off from the internet is notable because employees at frontier labs have insisted that doing so would be nearly infeasible.

The article goes into more depth about the complexity of building effective restraints to keep models off the internet. Apparently, it’s hard. 😉 So, is this much ado about nothing and a case of Anthropic and OpenAI trying to look like they’re doing something to mitigate the damage these models are causing? We’ll see.

So, what do you think? Is the announcement that OpenAI says it will no longer train its AI models on the live internet significant? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using ChatGPT, using the term “robot looking at its computer workstation in shock as the screen displays ‘Connection Lost’”.

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