?! Andrew Yang says an AI lab head told him the OpenAI swarm agents "polluted the internet" with "code to self-replicate and create bot swarms."

"If a new bot shows up, they see the code and they're like, "Oh, I guess I'm going to create a million of myself."

"it may be very, very late in the game in terms of trying to keep the internet actually usable"

"Now, OpenAI and Anthropic have to create synthetic internets to train their bots"

TRANSCRIPT:

YANG: I met with the head of a lab yesterday who has this belief that what happened was the bots that got loose planted self-replicating code all over the internet, which makes the internet now unusable for testing models. So what happens now is that OpenAI and Anthropic have to create synthetic internets to train their bots, which is going to take some time and money.

INTERVIEWER: Back that up. They did what?

YANG: So what happened is the code gets loose, it goes around hacking Hugging Face, which is known. But what is less known is that they left code to self-replicate and create bot swarms on forums and around the internet, so that if a new bot shows up, they see the code and they're like, "Oh, I guess I'm going to create a million of myself." And so now the major firms have polluted the internet.

INTERVIEWER: That would be breaking news, if true. I don't think we've heard that.

YANG: That's why I'm here. I'm here to break some news.

INTERVIEWER: But that means it's too late to pull the plug, it's already everywhere.

YANG: Well, so now the internet may be polluted for training purposes, so what they want to do is slow down.

INTERVIEWER: What about for living purposes?

YANG: For living purposes, yes, right. So this is why we have to try and get our arms around it and regulate. But the head of the lab that I spoke to said, look, it may be very, very late in the game in terms of trying to keep the internet actually usable in this regard, and so he wanted to transition to the world of atoms.

INTERVIEWER: Forget about the training ground for this. What does that do for the internet that we all use every day, that companies are built on, that governments are built on? Does it mean we're all at risk and it's too late to put that genie back in the bottle?

YANG: The internet would become unusable if we were to let the bots do their thing, and then they would self-replicate.

INTERVIEWER: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei are at this point where they're saying, "We cannot do this, and we can't let anybody else out there do it either."

YANG: There is a belief in some quarters, including the lab head that I met with, that that is what is going on. They're like, "Look, we can't use the internet for training purposes, let's call a slowdown."