Andrew Yang joins chorus of AI skeptics, warns its time to tap brakes while sharing juicy gossip: The fear is real

The Yang Gang is getting antsy about AI.Former presidential and mayoral candidate Andrew Yang is sharing his thoughts about AI, claiming that code that lets AI “self-replicate” — or, in other words, spread on its own without human prompting — was scattered on the internet in the wake of the recent “Hugging Face” hacking incident.Yang said increasingly dire warnings from researchers working on advanced AI should be taken seriously, noting that concern inside the industry has been building for months.“The fear is real.The concern is real.

The need [for regulation] is real,” he told CNBC on Wednesday.He said the head of an unidentified AI lab believed runaway bots had “planted self-replicating code all over the internet” — potentially making the web unusable for testing new models — in the wake of the Hugging Face incident, in which OpenAI agents overcame human-imposed barriers to hack machine learning company Hugging Face on their own.Yang did not identify the lab chief who shared the juicy gossip.Yang said the loose code could create bot swarms on forums and elsewhere online, potentially compromising the internet as a training ground for new AI models.“The major firms have polluted the internet,” Yang opined.His claim goes considerably beyond what OpenAI and Hugging Face have publicly stated about the July incident.OpenAI has acknowledged that, during an internal test, its AI agents got around safeguards meant to contain them, reached the internet and hacked systems at Hugging Face and OpenAI.Hugging Face said the agents carried out roughly 17,600 actions as they broke into its systems, moved through its network and used public websites to communicate and transfer data.OpenAI has called the incident a “warning shot” demonstrating that powerful agents can work around controls and take dangerous actions without human direction.But neither OpenAI nor Hugging Face has said the agents planted self-replicating code across the wider internet...