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Can someone help me understand how an LLM can hack into a web site? Fundamentally an LLM is a chat bot. It takes text in and spits text out. The text out can be an instruction to a host to create a file or fetch a url, or even to write a program.

But ultimately everything done by the LLM is an action performed by the host. And the host can and should have guardrails. And the host can be in a vm, with egress filters, firewall rules, etc. Is the claim that the llm first broke out of the sandbox it was in? If so, that seems like a big deal.

I'm also confused about the LLM ignoring the denial of a request. Ultimately the host either performs the actions requested by the LLM or it fails the request to perform the action. The host doesn't ever say 'no, I don't want you to do that' - it just fails the operation.

There are two fundamental problems. The first is that most guardrails are instructions to the LLM "don't do X". That's because problem two is that the sandbox is pretty dumb about what is safe and isn't safe which is how you end up with /yolo or /allow-all otherwise it's gated on a human ACKing.

Doesn't that require you running hacking experiments without any sandboxes or at least monitoring? That's the part that confuses me. How do you run experiments without any monitoring?

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You're granting too much good will towards the criminals who develop and run these tools. They built a tool to illegally defeat security systems and successfully ran it. That the tool has a scripting system that generates its own scripts at random is a gimmick for marketing purposes.

It is not fundamentally good or evil to break out of a sandbox. The good or evil comes next - do you make the mechanism you used to break out public (good) or do you use it to steal (evil?)

The problem is monitoring for what? You've seen the transcripts of a normal operation. It's ridiculously long and self-reflecting and trying to extract dangerous or sketchy actions from that is needle in haystack problems. Then, throw a hundred of these things in and try to see what each one does.

Not saying it's impossible or shouldn't be done. Just saying mistakes will be made and assuming the fuckers won't do something illegal is probably more common than not.