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simonw 13 minutes ago [-]
These are not very smart spies:
> A chatbot account tied to Alfozan’s spouse, which shared identifiers with his own account, submitted prompts between Sept. 24 and Sept. 30 about building, installing, obscuring, and remotely accessing a recording device, prosecutors said. Queries included how to “build a continuous audio recorder” and “encrypt the SD card,” prosecutors claimed. On Sept. 27 and 28, the account asked about the specific device that was later found, including its unique MAC address.
adamm255 10 minutes ago [-]
Learning that every thought you’ve put into an LLM, is recorded and readily available for evidence is going to be interesting for a lot of people.
3 minutes ago [-]
janalsncm 3 minutes ago [-]
You probably don’t hear about the smart ones.
ReptileMan 4 minutes ago [-]
I am not sure whether it bodes well for humanity that the advice "If you want to break the law use local abliterated model or at least a Chinese one" actually has to be written down.
TZubiri 8 minutes ago [-]
"OpenAI personnel found the device Sept. 30. It was plugged into a USB port on the back of a television in an executive conference room and had been concealed in toilet paper,"
I wonder what the IQ of someone needs to be to think that covering it up with tp makes it less suspicious instead of more. And I also wonder what the hiring process was like to hire someone with that mental frame.
msdz 3 minutes ago [-]
> And I also wonder what the hiring process was like to hire someone with that mental frame.
Remember, this is only the company responsible for potentially building and aligning AGI. No need to be setting high expectations toward their sandboxing or hiring capabilities.
MisterMunchkin 7 minutes ago [-]
Yeah he should have just stuck a post it note with the words “do not remove” and nobody would have noticed
natpalmer1776 2 minutes ago [-]
IT would have noticed next time they had to plug something into the TV. Whether they cared enough to figure out what it was is a different story.
ajross 10 minutes ago [-]
Given that this is being described as an "executive conference room", it's more likely an attempt at insider trading than espionage. Decisions made in those rooms at OpenAI move markets (c.f. DRAM) for sure.
TZubiri 5 minutes ago [-]
OpenAI is both a company that manages a lot of money and a lot of political power, that the target was an "executive conference room" gives no indication as to whether the motives were financial or political.
What might tilt the bayesian balance in favour of political intent would be the nationality of the individual, state or religious sponsoring become hypotheses.
simonw 9 minutes ago [-]
This guy previously worked at Meta from 2017 to 2022 on Data Infrastructure projects.
I expect Meta are running an audit right now to figure out if he was involved in espionage back then as well.
throwa356262 35 minutes ago [-]
Part of the evidence was his wife's chatgpt logs.
Remember kids, uncle Sam can see anything you tell your AI and will use that against you.
netsharc 11 minutes ago [-]
A service you delegate your thinking to (Brain-aaS?), which the provider can also instruct to report anything suspicious... What a world we have now.
I wonder if the BaaS-providers monitor the accounts of decision makers. They could profit if they figure out what e.g. a central banker is going to decide. Or... if they're the ones deciding for him.
Hah, you can even streamline that by having an AI agent that autonomously makes decisions based on insider info...
binlog 27 minutes ago [-]
Man really switched to his wife’s account and thought no one would be able to track him there. Calling this amateur would be an insult to amateurs.
redox99 23 minutes ago [-]
How does someone this dumb get hired at openai?
schiffern 8 minutes ago [-]
>how does someone this dumb get hired
Using AI to pass the interview of course! I wish I was joking...
It's AI inbreeding all the way down.
ramraj07 18 minutes ago [-]
Smart people can do dumb things. Their LinkedIn profile looks typical for an OpenAI engineer.
We also don’t know if this person did it under duress.
robotnikman 9 minutes ago [-]
>We also don’t know if this person did it under duress.
He was a Saudi national, so that is a possibility
robotnikman 12 minutes ago [-]
Probably went to a prestigious university or had connections.
10xDev 17 minutes ago [-]
50% is looking and sounding the part, the other 50% is having a good university on your resume / good networking.
sdcfgy 14 minutes ago [-]
Yeah that. After three bad experiences in a row they are no hire status.
There’s plenty of better people out there who just aren’t interested in that sort of stuff.
14 minutes ago [-]
catchnear4321 21 minutes ago [-]
You might want to have a seat first if you want this explained.
tcdent 25 minutes ago [-]
> ... a chatbot account associated with Alfozan’s spouse (which shared multiple identifiers and attributes with Alfozan’s own chatbot account) submitted prompts between Sept. 24 and Sept. 30 related to building, customizing, installing, audio recording, testing, obfuscating, and remote accessing a device, including inquiries about “build[ing] a continuous audio recorder,” “customiz[ing] Wi-Fi . . . connectivity,” “improv[ing] audio and live listening,” and “encrypt[ing] the SD card,” among other things. The same chatbot account also submitted prompts specifically related to Recording Device 1, including its custom header and unique MAC address, between Sept. 27 and Sept. 28.
The justice.gov article doesn't specifically say it was an OpenAI account, but I think, based on the fact that they have logs including MAC address of the device, that we could probably assume that. The alternative is that other chatbot account providers are collaborating.
Regardless, doing a string search on a MAC address for a device you find inside your property doesn't strike me as an abuse of the data that is also your property.
schiffern 19 minutes ago [-]
>submitted prompts... including its custom header and unique MAC
Sounds more like he put the exact MAC address in a prompt somewhere while setting it up.
gip 19 minutes ago [-]
Not the smartest engineer ever, that use case perfectly align with using a Chinese model! And anyway I have no idea how he was hoping not to be caught in the case the device would be discovered.
clear-octopus 22 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
Barrin92 16 minutes ago [-]
in addition to the whole crime thing, an 'openai engineer', apparently engineering lead according to his linkedin, having to ask chatgpt to tell him how to set up a recorder or how to encrypt a sd card is something. Truly the cream of the engineering crop at those top AI labs
Aurornis 21 minutes ago [-]
True of any cloud service. If you are involved in a criminal investigation, they can get access to your data.
They can confiscate your computers, too.
This person, of all people, would know this. He really thought he’d never get caught.
TZubiri 3 minutes ago [-]
Uncle Sam? It's the same company, the 'spy' asked an OpenAI controlled product how to spy OpenAI, no state espionage or search warrants needed.
IncreasePosts 5 minutes ago [-]
Presumably they already knew who it was, if they were able to look at his wife's chat logs
catchnear4321 22 minutes ago [-]
Uno reverse card - you can send Uncle Sam whatever you care to. No need to specify an address.
delichon 1 hours ago [-]
Abdulrahman Alfozan, 35, a Saudi national, was arrested Friday and charged with using or attempting to use a device to intercept oral communications.
I guess I’m still wondering, because I did think this is what was being referred to but it is not a story about OpenAI.
arm32 1 hours ago [-]
Can you blame one for mixing them up at this point?
SpicyLemonZest 50 minutes ago [-]
Yes? I mean, I don’t think it’s a character flaw to not know things, but their rivalry is extremely notorious and relevant. Someone who can't keep them straight won’t be able to understand what’s going on in AI.
SpicyLemonZest 1 hours ago [-]
It could be that the reports are accurate and the device simply wasn’t as sophisticated as the statement implies. You could if you wanted use an AI model to analyze a USB camera with device name “John_Doe_1”.
Aboutplants 52 minutes ago [-]
He was just gathering training data
SoftTalker 20 minutes ago [-]
I mean really what's the big deal? Gathering information from unsuspecting parties who aren't aware it's happening? He was just doing what his employer does.
int32_64 2 hours ago [-]
Between this and the Ledger implants I wonder if AI companies will have a supply chain risk in the future where their models get exfiltrated over 5G.
Good time to start a company that builds giant Faraday cages over data centers.
pjc50 14 minutes ago [-]
Model "distillation" lets one model be trained on the outputs of another without having to directly steal it. It will be subject to constant arms race.
The alignment people would like you worry about the model exfiltrating itself, too.
IncreasePosts 50 seconds ago [-]
This technique currently works because the architecture of the model is generally published and well known. But, that isn't necessarily going to be the case in the future. For example, if some new model type which is not a LLM is discovered which gets closer to AGI, just training an LLM on its outputs will not necessarily give you a competitive model
pianopatrick 26 minutes ago [-]
Would be better to build the data centers under water than to build giant faraday cages.
Free cooling, safe from missile attack, and safe from some types of electronic spying.
Still a significantly less dumb idea than space data centers.
paimapi 15 minutes ago [-]
I'm imagining a certified scuba diver rubbing their wetsuitted hands gleefully as they dictated that comment
morkalork 23 minutes ago [-]
I could've sworn I read about Palmer Lucky making comments on hardware coming from China with wiretap implants in the last few days. Funny coincidence eh?
iAMkenough 1 hours ago [-]
From the makers of The Iron Dome, now introducing The Copper Dome
BeetleB 19 minutes ago [-]
Chances are he'll escape back home before the trial:
How did they get that capture of Alfozan looking behind the TV? Does OpenAI install its own surveillance cameras behind TVs to prevent espionage?
Aboutplants 51 minutes ago [-]
I imagine they found the device and then planted a camera to catch whomever came back to get the original device
vostrocity 48 minutes ago [-]
Free startup idea: Anti-espionage cameras for corporate offices. Put it behind TVs and plants etc. and it will notify the security team if it detects new objects.
paimapi 11 minutes ago [-]
I'm sure employers will never use in-office surveillance monitoring for anything that resembles algorithmic labor management and exploitation
Certainly they would be transparent and very ethical with something like that
JumpCrisscross 20 minutes ago [-]
> How did they get that capture of Alfozan looking behind the TV?
“OpenAI personnel found the device Sept. 3…On Oct. 5, the complaint says, Alfozan entered the conference room and appeared to look behind the television.”
The image was captured after the bug was found.
binlog 51 minutes ago [-]
A camera behind every TV in the office would be something…
But no the boring answer is that after they found the device they left it in place and planted the camera to see who came looking for it.
vostrocity 44 minutes ago [-]
That does make more sense. But if any company were to take surprising security measures, it should be the frontier labs.
qkaze15 26 minutes ago [-]
Sounds like fair use to me! Information wants to be free, remember?
seydor 1 hours ago [-]
> The employee was terminated.
in this context, they should be more specific about how terminal s/he is
netsharc 8 minutes ago [-]
Sarah Connor?
I_am_tiberius 1 hours ago [-]
You got me. I ask the obvious question: What's the "sophisticated" device?
0cf8612b2e1e 1 hours ago [-]
You can buy a voice recorder that will hold weeks of audio for tens of dollars.
Back of a TV is a decent hiding place. Wonder how they found it -was it actively transmitting?
to11mtm 55 minutes ago [-]
Well, The Thing [0] could potentially show up on a probing sweep if you're careful.
Unless you mean, it happened to be actively transmitting during a(n investigative) sweep.
Still, raises some fun concepts. The sort of things where in this current level of technology you'd almost need to supercool a room for a sweep, blast various RF/sound/etc and look for anything that even remotely warms up, to detect (1) whether something detected something worth recording for later as well as (2) something that might be on the right wavelength/etc to trigger a send.
SeedStudio is super nice - a lot of their gear is also popular in the MeshCore community (LoRa radios combined with ESP32 or NRF MCUs).
mrandish 9 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
2OEH8eoCRo0 1 hours ago [-]
Apple HomeView
nfw2 9 minutes ago [-]
> It was plugged into a USB port on the back of a television in an executive conference room and had been concealed in toilet paper
...uh what
Imnimo 52 minutes ago [-]
I have seem some articles which reference allegations from court documents / complaint, but I haven't been able to find the primary source. Do we know if that's publicly available yet?
Why make this public? Usually companies just silently terminate and pursue employees who do this.
simonw 12 minutes ago [-]
Sounds to me like the feds got involved already, and they're definitely going to want to make a big noise about this as a national security thing:
> “For us it is a matter of national security,” U.S. Attorney Craig Missakian said in a statement. [...]
> The case is being prosecuted by the National Security, Cyber & Special Prosecutions Section of the U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of California.
(But that was after OpenAI "referred the matter to the FBI")
There's presumably a strong argument for making this stuff known internally, since you want other employees to a) be on the lookout for it and b) get scared into NOT doing it themselves because someone else got caught.
If you tell your employees, the outside world is going to hear about it too.
gorgoiler 1 hours ago [-]
A common example is if a journalist approaches you saying they had a tip off and are about to run a story. The journalist, being a good old fashioned balanced-reporting type, calls you and asks you for a comment. Rather than responding to add your side to their story, you just blast out a press release before the journalist can even publish.
(Or maybe you spend two hours on the phone to them talking about all kinds of stuff while also scribbling a note to your PA saying “EMPLOYEE JOE BUG STORY LEAKED TO VALLEYWAG PUT OUT COUNTER PR GET AGEAD OF STORY” and hoping they get a tweet out before the valleywag gumshoe gets off the phone.)
(Or maybe you keep a notion.so page pre-filled with all your secrets and each one has a burn button next to it, ready for you to tap when ValleyWag call up for a comment on their upcoming exposé on PR/Disasters/20206090500039.md)
TZubiri 2 minutes ago [-]
I don't think criminal charges can be private
binlog 59 minutes ago [-]
Hard to keep a DoJ/FBI investigation under wraps
augment_me 1 hours ago [-]
IPO remember? Our information is so valuable we have foreign actors trying to steal it. Our model is so good it managed to figure out what this recording device was.
gizmodo59 1 hours ago [-]
court records? you can't hide them
testfrequency 58 minutes ago [-]
I’ve been wondering the same.
This isn’t uncommon, but it’s rare this info is shared in such detail publicly..possibly to make an example.
Interesting that they have a camera behind the TV, I suppose for this exact purpose.
leoqa 49 minutes ago [-]
They left him as an employee for the FBI to continue investigating; likely they setup cameras to get hard evidence he was tampering with them.
jeffbee 1 hours ago [-]
Right. I can guarantee that there are tens of thousands of listening devices with embedded radios in the OpenAI office, right now. The only open question is who controls them.
TacticalCoder 1 hours ago [-]
> The device was concealed in toilet paper, and its contents were encrypted.
Concealing a recording device in a conference room in toilet paper is a bit strange. Do executives meet in the toilets to discuss strategic moves?
ReptileMan 12 minutes ago [-]
Well ... a lot of products lately get enshittified.
> A chatbot account tied to Alfozan’s spouse, which shared identifiers with his own account, submitted prompts between Sept. 24 and Sept. 30 about building, installing, obscuring, and remotely accessing a recording device, prosecutors said. Queries included how to “build a continuous audio recorder” and “encrypt the SD card,” prosecutors claimed. On Sept. 27 and 28, the account asked about the specific device that was later found, including its unique MAC address.
I wonder what the IQ of someone needs to be to think that covering it up with tp makes it less suspicious instead of more. And I also wonder what the hiring process was like to hire someone with that mental frame.
Remember, this is only the company responsible for potentially building and aligning AGI. No need to be setting high expectations toward their sandboxing or hiring capabilities.
What might tilt the bayesian balance in favour of political intent would be the nationality of the individual, state or religious sponsoring become hypotheses.
I expect Meta are running an audit right now to figure out if he was involved in espionage back then as well.
Remember kids, uncle Sam can see anything you tell your AI and will use that against you.
I wonder if the BaaS-providers monitor the accounts of decision makers. They could profit if they figure out what e.g. a central banker is going to decide. Or... if they're the ones deciding for him.
Hah, you can even streamline that by having an AI agent that autonomously makes decisions based on insider info...
It's AI inbreeding all the way down.
We also don’t know if this person did it under duress.
He was a Saudi national, so that is a possibility
There’s plenty of better people out there who just aren’t interested in that sort of stuff.
The justice.gov article doesn't specifically say it was an OpenAI account, but I think, based on the fact that they have logs including MAC address of the device, that we could probably assume that. The alternative is that other chatbot account providers are collaborating.
Regardless, doing a string search on a MAC address for a device you find inside your property doesn't strike me as an abuse of the data that is also your property.
They can confiscate your computers, too.
This person, of all people, would know this. He really thought he’d never get caught.
Did OpenAI do a marketing bit in the middle of an espionage accusation?
Yes, they did. The people who felt it was totally normal to add that would no doubt be surprised how desperate and cheap it makes them look.
"almost surely made in china"
https://www.forth.news/lists/philapd/Cfs1w2A22JiL3fWSzA8Nx
Good time to start a company that builds giant Faraday cages over data centers.
The alignment people would like you worry about the model exfiltrating itself, too.
Free cooling, safe from missile attack, and safe from some types of electronic spying.
Still a significantly less dumb idea than space data centers.
https://www.propublica.org/article/saudi-fugitives-accused-o...
Certainly they would be transparent and very ethical with something like that
“OpenAI personnel found the device Sept. 3…On Oct. 5, the complaint says, Alfozan entered the conference room and appeared to look behind the television.”
The image was captured after the bug was found.
But no the boring answer is that after they found the device they left it in place and planted the camera to see who came looking for it.
in this context, they should be more specific about how terminal s/he is
Back of a TV is a decent hiding place. Wonder how they found it -was it actively transmitting?
Unless you mean, it happened to be actively transmitting during a(n investigative) sweep.
Still, raises some fun concepts. The sort of things where in this current level of technology you'd almost need to supercool a room for a sweep, blast various RF/sound/etc and look for anything that even remotely warms up, to detect (1) whether something detected something worth recording for later as well as (2) something that might be on the right wavelength/etc to trigger a send.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
I was making a joke, but it does look like they got their components from Seeed Studio based on photos.
https://assets.sfstandard.com/image/994911177489/image_k101c...
https://www.seeedstudio.com/XIAO-ESP32S3-Sense-p-5639.html
...uh what
It looks like it’s the (SeeedStudio XIAO ESP32S3 Sense w/ WiFi, BLE, OV2640, Mic) https://ca.robotshop.com/products/seeedstudio-xiao-esp32s3-s...
Which is just an esp32s3 based device. I assume the word “sophisticated” in openAI report is just copy paste from device description.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1reman2waLs
> “For us it is a matter of national security,” U.S. Attorney Craig Missakian said in a statement. [...]
> The case is being prosecuted by the National Security, Cyber & Special Prosecutions Section of the U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of California.
(But that was after OpenAI "referred the matter to the FBI")
There's presumably a strong argument for making this stuff known internally, since you want other employees to a) be on the lookout for it and b) get scared into NOT doing it themselves because someone else got caught.
If you tell your employees, the outside world is going to hear about it too.
(Or maybe you spend two hours on the phone to them talking about all kinds of stuff while also scribbling a note to your PA saying “EMPLOYEE JOE BUG STORY LEAKED TO VALLEYWAG PUT OUT COUNTER PR GET AGEAD OF STORY” and hoping they get a tweet out before the valleywag gumshoe gets off the phone.)
(Or maybe you keep a notion.so page pre-filled with all your secrets and each one has a burn button next to it, ready for you to tap when ValleyWag call up for a comment on their upcoming exposé on PR/Disasters/20206090500039.md)
This isn’t uncommon, but it’s rare this info is shared in such detail publicly..possibly to make an example.
Concealing a recording device in a conference room in toilet paper is a bit strange. Do executives meet in the toilets to discuss strategic moves?
Either way, there goes the false flag and the reason for companies to stop hiring humans over this espionage.