OpenAI on Tuesday revealed that it paused reinforcement learning (RL) training for its latest artificial intelligence (AI) models for two weeks while it shored up additional defenses and increased the scope of its monitoring to avert another Hugging Face-like incident.
"As models become more capable, the risks associated with developing and testing them internally also grow," the AI company said. "Our standards for monitoring, alignment, and security must stay ahead of those risks. We wanted to take the time necessary to meet those standards, so we temporarily slowed the pace of scaling."
The company said its largest planned frontier RL run remains on hold for the time being as it conducts smaller-scale training and evaluations to evaluate model behavior, validate its safeguards, and establish more concrete evidence of alignment before moving to the next phase.
To that end, OpenAI said it plans to strengthen safeguards across its development process, including monitoring to better respond to unintended and concerning behavior; alignment to reduce the likelihood of harmful or unauthorized actions; and security measures to limit what AI systems can access or affect.
Part of this involves stronger sandboxes, network isolation to prevent internet access, and continuous security testing to remove potentially vulnerable shared services, reduce standing privileges, and improve security and trust boundaries.
