On the latest episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Kirsten Korosec, Sean O'Kane, and I discussed how Altman's comments were probably prompted by a recent hack in which an OpenAI agent breached Hugging Face's systems. Sean noted that while a hack performed by an AI agent is novel, the hack itself was not 'some new advanced thing.' 'It was more like Nixon's people breaking into Watergate than some real stealthy cyber-op, because it didn't need to be, and it wasn't instructed to be,' Sean said. 'Hopefully, this is a sign that these companies will take this forward and be more careful about that stuff.' Altman's comments also gave me a chance to wonder about the usefulness of the whole accelerationist versus deceleration debate, because (yes, I'm about to quote myself) the framing 'kind of suggests that there's only one path' and 'all we get to decide ' inasmuch as we get to decide at all ' is, do we speed up or do we slow down'' Sean O'Kane: Maybe we've finally hit an inflection...
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