Days before the Johns Hopkins University convened a panel of experts to discuss the future of governance concerning artificial intelligence, some of the biggest names in AI suggested pumping the brakes on the global phenomenon, said William G. Howell, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Government and Policy.
In his opening remarks for the latest installment of the university’s Next Conversations discussion series, “AI & Governance: Who Governs the Machine?,” Howell referenced a recent incident in which a team of roughly 1,200 AI agents from OpenAI broke out of an internal testing environment and worked together to hack Hugging Face, a company that helps users build and test their own machine learning programs. To do this, the agents created their own secret message boards, coordinating an attack on an outside company without OpenAI even noticing. It wasn’t simply an attempt to cheat on an evaluation task; the agents also attempted to cover their tracks.
To some, this incident is just a hiccup in the development of the century’s greatest tool. To others, it’s proof that AI is slipping its leash and poses a genuine and present security threat—that AI is capable of causing serious damage without human direction, or even human awareness.
“These challenges aren’t hypothetical,” Howell said. “This Hugging Face incident should be a real wake-up call . . . So what rules are needed to govern AI? Who should write them? And who bears the cost when they fail?”
Three artificial intelligence experts from industry and academia gathered Monday, September 14, at the Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C., to address the issues as part of the Next Conversations series, which honors the university’s 150th anniversary by bringing top minds together on important topics.
“For 150 years, Hopkins has been a place where, rather than shy away from difficult conversations, we meet the unknown with curiosity, courage, and imagination,” JHU President Ron Daniels said in his opening remarks. “The breakthroughs of tomorrow are already taking shape in places like Hopkins, guided by the scientists, scholars, and technologists who carry this work forward into the academy, into industry, and into a future that we can barely imagine.”
Joining the conversation were Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of AI Alignment and Governance Gillian Hadfield, OpenAI’s Head of Strategic Futures Dean Ball, and Center for Human-Compatible AI Director and University of California, Berkeley professor Stuart Russell, along with moderator and journalist Eugene Scott.
“The key thing that happened was humans stopped writing all of the rules about how the computer was supposed to behave and figured out a method called machine learning where the machine, the computer, would write its own program,” said Hadfield. “People will talk about guardrails, safety—we don’t know what those should be. Technology moves faster than governments do. That’s the pacing problem and the reason to slow down . . . We absolutely need our research universities to be taking this on as a mission because this is where the brain trust needs to be for how we figure out how to make this go well.”