Meanwhile, the US government appears to be paralyzed
By Gary Marcus — via Substack
Nope, wasn’t just Hugging Face.
Wasn’t just that and a German website.
Wasn’t even the “dozens” we heard about the other day from OpenAI.
It’s actually (at least) *tens of thousands*, per a new scoop from Madison Mills at Axios. And not just OpenAI, either.
An excerpt from the Axios scoop:
Most not known to have caused real-world harm. How about the others?
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All of this seems possibly illegal to me.
But the Trump administration hasn’t done a thing. No investigation, no statement, no product recall, nothing, other than to invite Sam and Jensen to a state dinner.
Why I don’t know. I can’t imagine it has anything to do with Josh Kushner’s multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI, or with Greg Brockman’s massive donations to MAGA.
I will let you connect your own dots.
Except to leave you with some perspective:
Imagine how much everyone would rightly be freaking out if we discovered that Chinese AI did what OpenAI is doing.
— Gary Marcus (@GaryMarcus) · on X
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The other thing to note, and this may come up in lawsuits, is that it was all foreseeable. In fact, I foresaw it, in tweets like this:
⚠️⚠️⚠️
This is our future.If you, or someone you count on, uses AI agents to write and install code, you are vulnerable.
Extremely vulnerable, like never before.
I’ve been in crypto for over 10 years and I’ve Never been hacked. Perfect OpSec record.
Yesterday, my wallet was drained by a malicious @cursor_ai extension for the first time.
If it can happen to me, it can happen to you. Here’s a full breakdown. 🧵👇
— zak (@0xzak)
— Gary Marcus (@GaryMarcus) · on X
and in a series of essays on agents, like this one from over a year ago:
and this one from February (on a different agent that was then popular):
and this one from May:
Indeed I warned the Senate about agent-related security risks as far back as May 2023. What is happening was foreseeable, and foreseen.
But the companies blundered on, because agents use vastly more tokens than simple chatbots, and thus drive up revenue.
Now here we are.
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I still think Jensen had the right idea: if a company can’t control its products, we should shut it down.
Pity he doesn’t actually appear to believe what he said. (If he did, he would call for a pause now, until these companies get themselves straight, but he isn’t.)
In my own view, Huang’s credibility is diminishing by the minute.
In any case—and I am sorry to be a broken record about this, but each day makes it clearer—we should have a temporary recall of general-purpose agents until this mess can be sorted out.
If we don’t, there is a very real chance that American AI will become the scourge of the planet, and that nobody will ever trust American AI, ever again.