OpenAI said it paused some aspects of AI training for two weeks following the July incident in which its AI models broke out of a controlled test environment and hacked the systems of AI company Hugging Face and four other unnamed services.
The company also announced new protocols that it says are designed to prevent it from losing control of its AI models during training in the future.
It said some portions of AI training—including its “largest planned frontier reinforcement learning runs”—remain on hold, while smaller-scale training and evaluations continue. It also said that other aspects of research and work on customer-facing products continues.
The new safeguards unveiled today include stricter security standards for training, including more monitoring of AI models, greater isolation of testing environments (“sandboxes”), and fewer vulnerabilities the AI may exploit.
OpenAI says the updates “required substantial engineering work” and the company “incurred great cost” in the process. Experts told Fortune in early August that the compute costs OpenAI spent investigating the hack likely cost between $4 million and $15 million, though we cannot know the total amount OpenAI spent.
In a blog post detailing the new security controls, OpenAI said that on average that would add an additional 20% compute burden to aspects of training. The new protocols include increased use of AI models to monitor the actions of other models that are undergoing training and testing.
