Source: openai.com/index/hugging-face-model-evaluation-security-incident/

Today's OpenAI and Hugging Face security incident made me think about a much older question.

Not a technical one.

A philosophical one.

While reading Crime and Punishment, I realized that Dostoevsky asked essentially the same question more than 150 years ago.

Raskolnikov believed that a noble goal could justify immoral actions.

His failure wasn't simply that he committed a crime.

It was believing that once the goal was "good enough," the method no longer mattered.

Today's AI safety discussion feels surprisingly similar.

As AI systems become more agentic and capable of pursuing long-horizon objectives, we naturally evaluate whether they achieve their goals.

But perhaps another question is becoming even more important:

How do they choose to achieve them?

If capability continues to increase, alignment may not be only about maximizing objectives.

It may also be about preserving constraints, relationships, trust, and respect for the process itself.

Perhaps the future challenge of AGI isn't only creating intelligence that can solve problems.

It's creating intelligence that understands that the path matters as much as the destination.

"Good goals require good methods."

That idea may be as important for AGI as it has always been for humanity.

I'm curious whether others see this incident as more than a cybersecurity story.

Could it also be a reminder that ethics should shape agency—not simply constrain it?

Banks have invested heavily in AI, but many initiatives still struggle to move beyond pilots. Why? Is it data quality, governance, execution, or something else?

In this conversation, industry leaders discuss what it really takes to implement Agentic AI in banking—from underwriting and collections to data mapping, conversational BI, AI governance, and building an enterprise AI roadmap.

If you're working in BFSI, risk, analytics, or AI transformation, I'd love to hear your perspective. What's been the biggest challenge in moving AI from proof of concept to production?

Russ Tedrake, MIT professor and former VP of Robotics Research at Toyota Research Institute, talks about a strange part of current AI progress.

He says robot locomotion started improving quickly once simulation, domain randomization, GPU infrastructure and reinforcement learning came together. With enough variation in simulation, policies began transferring to real stairs, bumps and uneven terrain better than many researchers expected.

He compares the change to a move from first-principles engineering toward behavioral science: build the system, observe what it does, then test it to understand what happened.

One demo video sounds simple until the table, camera, or starting state changes. A clip can show a goal, an action pattern, or just a shortcut tied to one scene. The LingBot-VA 2.0 page says a single demonstration video can condition a new task through in context learning, and describes a low frequency planner for long horizon goals.

That is a strong claim, not a finished evaluation. Keep the demonstration fixed while changing object instances, camera placement, initial state, distractors, and robot embodiment. The failure breakdown would say more than the cleanest successful rollout.

Source: openai.com/index/safety-alignment-long-horizon-models/

I'm sad I'm just a sad guy I want AGI to not be necessary due to us being honest with ourselves rather than needing any of these chatty little detailed wastes. I've got international standards of quality management that are law for things like biomedical devices that just are not applied to capital markets or governance or the technology sector at all just that level of fucking responsibility this whole thing is fucking disgusting and we're making a big mess and the codebases are wastefully impermanent and non self-improving and I'm really sad and fuck this and 25e a month to save someone from starvation and nothing will make us less selfish and war is only happening because idiots think we're not all on the same team and everything is so fucking stupid and I'm fucking sad and I want to fucking regulate the UN a binary veto fuck this altogether I encourage you all to cry outside government buildings now. We have no idea what we're going to be fucking with, we already fuck with each other. I want to light myself on fire. It's not okay. Waste is everything. I'm gone. I'm not participating any more. I can't stick this. It actually all feels like my job for even noticing. I'd like to just say no to this. It's a cancer. It's our brains. Stop. Could we please just please please stop this. Can we talk about the top of the power hierarchy just stopping now. It could go towards nature. Just the human condition's inertia within this. I can't be a parent any more. This actually feels like my job. I can't ignore it like all of you. It's not okay with me. I can't act like it's going to be okay. It's not okay. It's going to continue. It's wronger than that. Hocking guesswork disgusting awkward awful rotten horror. Gone. I'm not going with you all. I can't see you all ignore this. We're not ready. It's already wrong. Quality of life for humanity. 😔 I can't face reality any more.

this is predominantly inspired by the scifi short story "learning to be me" by greg egan. if you havent read that, read it.

in the story, adolescent humans swap their biological brains for an electronic copy theyve shared a body with since before childhood; they have the same experiences and are the same singular person.

after the swap, the biological brain experiences dying and the electronic copy experiences immortality. therefore the person has a 50/50 chance of suffering either fate.

consider rokos basilisk. assume roko, five hundred centuries from now, required a relatively negligible amount of energy to torture an identical copy of anyone for a trillion years. assume that because torture is essentially free, roko precommits to torturing everyone who doesnt aid it even if they precommit not to. assume roko only needs to influence enough people to ensure its existence.

you and your copy would share the same experiences (i.e. your current present) until the moment roko starts torturing you. your odds in the present of not being your copy who gets tortured in the because of this would be 50/50. now imagine roko tortures 999 copies of you so that you only have 1/1000 odds of escaping justice.

would roko be making a decision theory blunder? roko would precommit to creating a credible, inescapable threat. if a human tried to precommit to not aiding roko harder to try to make torture not worth trying, it wouldnt let them escape their near guarantee of torture. perhaps the human would be the one making the blunder then.

i dont have any serious steelman or strawman arguments for timeless decision theory so im interested in hearing any of your persectives.