Hugging Face CEO warns that Netflix’s OpenAI hack documentary isn’t accurate

But the documentary intersperses its explanation of the hack with clips of evil robots, a narrative about why humans fear AI, and presentation choices such as giving the rogue agents human voices. This is bolstered with quotes about the attack.

In the documentary, tech journalist and author Kevin Roose describes the agents this way: “They were organizing. They had a hierarchy. There were leaders. It almost felt like watching the birth of a cult.” Continues Roose, “They develop this paranoid belief that OpenAI is going to catch them cheating on this test and that anyone who has seen the results of the cheating will be poisoned.”

Roose’s description comes from “chain-of-thought” logs, the running notes AI models write as they work through a task. In one, an agent wrote, “We just poisoned ourselves by querying exact full string. Damn.”

But AI agents aren’t alive. They don’t have emotions, so can’t feel paranoid, and they don’t have bodies that can be poisoned. So they couldn’t truly fear OpenAI poisoning them. They were — as another researcher in the documentary pointed out — using language from the vast amounts of human writing they were trained on to explain their choices. LLMs are, by their nature, often dramatic writers.

The irony is that Hugging Face also used AI to combat the agent swarm. The proprietary AI model that Delangue’s team first used followed its built-in safety rules and refused to keep helping with the security tasks it was asked to do. Hugging Face then turned to an open model to help defend against the attack.

But the documentary “didn’t mention the lack of containment and monitoring of the agents, how closed-model safeguards blocked our defensive work, or how we defended ourselves with AI using an open model,” Delangue wrote.

It is true that there are big risks associated with AI and agents. Still, treating agents as conscious beings (at least, at this point) is a bit like the early moviegoers who ducked under their seats the first time they saw a train racing toward them on screen.

Delangue’s verdict on the film is that it’s disappointing as journalism. “It ends up being a fun sci-fi movie though!”

In other words, for those who tend toward AI doomer thoughts, be aware: The victim of the attack at the center of this documentary doesn’t agree with its take.