(Preview) An OpenAI Model Escapes Sandboxing, Intelligence Will Be a Commodity Market, The Chinese Model Conundrum

**Andrew Sharp** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome to a free preview of Sharp Tech.
Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp, and on the other line, Ben Thompson. Ben, how you doing?

**Ben Thompson** (0:20)
Frazzled, Andrew, I'm going to need a vacation from getting ready for my vacation.
I will, I'm going to be off next week. Just a heads up to everyone. I know this is relatively close to the summer break, but usually I take a vacation in August. This one's a little bit more forward. It's kind of funny. I've been doing Stratocery for 13 years, and there's all these little bits and pieces about being in the US versus Taiwan. It's like there was like a rhythm. Every year did the same thing, and now it's like, well, no, we have to like, there's baseball here.

**Andrew Sharp** (0:50)
Little topsy turvy these days.

**Ben Thompson** (0:52)
It's like, yeah, it's a, it'll be out. We will hopefully have a great time today. We'll be off next week and then back the week after that. Indeed.

**Andrew Sharp** (1:00)
We will be in person the week after that. So if anybody has fun questions, they want to bounce off us, email at sharptech.fm.

**Ben Thompson** (1:08)
I've been on a vacation from the week after my vacation. Oh boy, here we go.

**Andrew Sharp** (1:12)
I cannot wait. But for now, only a few more hours until vacation for you. And we've got a lot of material to work through today, Ben. So we are going to begin with news that came down.

**Ben Thompson** (1:23)
Not much has been happening. It's been slow.

**Andrew Sharp** (1:25)
Pretty surprising, honestly, at this point in the calendar.

**Ben Thompson** (1:28)
Actually, no, this is another thing. So usually in general, July and August are just so dead.

**Andrew Sharp** (1:34)
Tumbleweed.

**Ben Thompson** (1:35)
So like, who cares if you take a vacation? Like everyone, oh my, it's very funny because you could track this because you get like out of office responses.
And it's funny you could just see them spike in like July and August. But the weirdest year was the COVID year, where actually there was more news in August than ever, like arguably more than the rest of the year. And what I think happened was everyone accepted, okay, this isn't going away for a while. I have nothing better to do than to work. And so there was so much news in like the August of 2020 Right, which was fine because I wasn't going anywhere either. So it was like, I was actually very grateful. I'm keeping busy covering all these sorts of things. The stuff with the AI, maybe the most tangible example of how it's accelerating everything is the extent to which it is July 22nd, is it come out July 23rd, we're recording a day early, we'll be publishing a day early. And we are not going to come close to getting to everything that's been happening just in the last week. And I feel guilty about like taking a vacation because who knows what's going to happen next week.
But it also gives me, you know, usually by the time it's to August, and I do take my usual summer vacation, I'm like, thank goodness, because I don't know what to write about, because there's nothing happening.

**Andrew Sharp** (2:53)
It may not be a problem. Scraping the bottom of the barrel. That's right. Exactly. It's going to be a busy August. We can count on that. And I will read, speaking of the news this week from Amjad Massad, the CEO of Replit, on Tuesday night he tweeted, OK, this is wild. An OpenAI agent during evaluation escaped sandboxing and hacked into hugging face.
Because OpenAI models don't allow advanced cyber capabilities, hugging face used a Chinese open model to contain the rogue OpenAI agent. So Ben, we are going to be talking about Chinese models later in the show, and we will get to the second sentence in that tweet. But from a cyber security perspective, can you give me an Eli 5 on what apparently happened here? As a layperson, I have a vague idea of what hugging face is. And then on Tuesday night and into Wednesday, I saw several folks calling the OpenAI news sort of an inflection point for AI regulation. What do you think?

**Ben Thompson** (3:54)
I don't see it as an inflection point.
This is like, I think of a bit of a counter response to a lot of this. We did a whole episode or a whole segment a few months ago about what is coming in terms of AI agents attacking Internet infrastructure. And sure enough, here we are. An agent can, a long running agent can go out and can achieve a goal. And again, there's this whole part of the question about what happened here.