Last week, CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman confirmed that the company is not currently training GPT-5, but is instead focusing on enhancing the abilities of its most recent GPT-4 model. Altman connected remotely with Lex Fridman, a computer scientist and podcaster, during a Massachusetts Institute of Technology event in order to talk about Artificial Intelligence. During the event, Fridman raised a question about the open letter that asked software engineers to suspend the training of AI models that are much bigger than GPT-4 for six months.
Altman agreed with some parts of the letter, such as the necessity to guarantee that AI models are secure and align with human values. However, he commented that “the letter misses the most technical aspect about where we need to pause,” adding that “an earlier version of the letter claims that we are training GPT-5 right now, which is false; we are not training it, and we won’t for some time, so in that sense, it was sort of silly.”
The Reddit forums have recently been cluttered with increasing amounts of messages generated by ChatGPT bots and posted by several accounts. Scenarios like this can be seen in Subreddits like r/AskHistorians, r/AskWomen, r/AskEconomics, and r/AskPhilosophy, just to name a few. Reddit stated that they have removed a large number of these accounts, however, they continue to make their presence known in the platform, providing users with AI generated text that has often been linked with content such as adult material and illegal drugs.
Moreover, a Reddit user who moderates the Subreddit of Technology pointed out how the Reddit anti-spam systems on the platform tend to be subverted by these bots, and that when the bots are addressed, they have already served their purpose. Additionally, the user added how the bots are overwhelmingly used for simple advertising motives, and not for political purposes, adding that a great part of the content is in relation to the sale of adult content, marijuana, gambling, and platforms that scam people with credit cards and fake product delivery.
Due to this clear abuse, OpenAI has decided to work with Bugcrowd, one of the most prestigious bug bounty platforms, in order to foster a program where they compensate people that find vulnerabilities, bugs, and security flaws in any of the AI products released by them. Financial rewards can oscillate between $200 and $20,000 USD depending on the severity of the issue, along with the exceptionality of the findings.
CEO of Twitter, Elon Musk, recently agreed to an open letter that asked to pause the training of large AI models for six months, taking into account the potential danger they may eventually pose to the world. Surprisingly enough, despite his agreement, Musk has recently bought around 10,000 GPUs in order to develop generative AI models that could work as a ChatGPT bot similar to the ones flooding Reddit nowadays, and with less restrictions in terms of what is considered as politically correct. It has still yet to be determined how this technology will be applied, however, some speculate that it may be for the improvement of the search process on Twitter or the development of better advertising methods.
Despite the current abuse of the ChatGPT bots and their malicious purposes, AI still has the potential to revolutionize and make our world a better place. This is the main reason why OpenAI is investing heavily in research, engineering and trying to detect flaws in their systems that could potentially come up. For this reason they have established this bug bounty program in order to discuss, collaborate and detect any potential issue that could arise in the long run.
