On Friday, OpenAI said 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.
The frontier lab 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.
Joke theory:
This whole time, they’ve been testing in Prod and now they’re hoping that there are enough users left to bury their contrived content because it’ll be too difficult to delete it all.
Now they’re moving back into Dev.
Real theory:
People are probably discovering exploits through real-world interactions with their models, so they’re going back into their shell before someone declares “fair game.”