“We’ve stolen everything worthwhile, now we’ll just concentrate on fleecing our users and enshittification.”
this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2026
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Translation: We've run out of shit to steal, and there's too much slop out there for us to continue anyway. Thanks, suckers!
Not many people seem to be reading the article vs commenting based on the headline. For those who didn't read it, this has nothing to do with pretraining off the Internet as a data source and instead relates to post-training sandboxing with true air gapping after the Huggingface hack.
To be fair, it's not Lemmy's fault the author of the headline went with a confusing title that misrepresents the actual story in order to seem more sensationalistic. But given how often that happens with stories on the subject, it's worth keeping in mind that only reading headlines and forming opinions off that might lead to a sense of things that are detached from reality.
To be fair, the actual article is also batshit.
“So is it as easy as just putting it in a sandbox? No, it’s not,” he concluded.
That comes after the company deployed swarms of agents in red-teaming exercises that attempted to escape from their sandbox.
So, start by /not/ setting up "swarms" and tasking them to hack shit?
Not all swarms have been intentional. IIRC, the agents in the Hugging Face incident formed their own swarm. They weren't even supposed to be "aware" that there were other agents.
so was it the AI poison, or the pollution from ai warping data, like the 10th photo copy in a chain rendering the image unrecognizable
Probably the pollution. A lot of AI companies are trying to find ways around it, by including watermarks in their model output that their tools can detect, and so on.
We already know that training models on themselves causes model collapse, so OpenAI deciding that they've had quite enough wouldn't be surprising.
On top of that, a lot of websites are clamping down on access because of scraping concerns. Reddit shut down a lot of their third-party APIs, and nicer features, like RSS, Old Reddit (if you haven't used it in 6 months, you lose access to it, and you need an account for it), etc. Google seems to want a captcha on every search. Twitter famously ramped up the price of its API immensely,.and now has ridiculously stringent measures for accounts, like needing users to download the app, and give hand-scans. It wouldn't be at all surprising for OpenAI to decide its not worth the effort at this point to try and get around all that, nor pay for it, when they've already got all the previous data. Training doesn't destroy the data used.
A lot of AI training data these days is generated synthetically anyway, and that can be done in-house, whether by their own models, or downloading an open weights model and running it themselves.
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It was all the goblins
Nothing accidentally did anything. They will still train on the open internet. All lies.
I agree that they're lying, but I wouldn't be surprised if they really do stop training on "live" internet data.
The lie is in their stated reasoning. This has nothing to do with AI being "too dangerous" to release into the wild. There's no reason to involve AI in gathering training data anyway... it's always been possible to scrape the internet quickly and cheaply with non-AI crawlers and bots.
The real reason is that the internet just doesn't have enough useful training data anymore. There's so much AI slop out there that the frontier labs risk model collapse if they continue to train on it. Large swathes of the internet have also become openly hostile to AI, either blocking the traffic outright or redirecting their crawlers into AI tarpits that intentionally waste their time and feed them endless reems of useless garbage. They've poisoned the proverbial well for everyone and now they're afraid to drink the water.
This isn't about scraping materials for training the underlying LLM or image gen models. This is about testing and training the agent frameworks that are given tasks to execute.
Yes, that's a reasonable assumption based on what they said.
You also have to consider, however, that they are lying sacks of shit and would sooner eat their own children than tell you a truth that would lower their stock price. Impending model collapse is one of those truths.
I would only believe this as far as it kind of makes sense anyway - their data centers are big enough a locally cached copy of most of the internet will simply allow much faster, cheaper itterations of their reinforcement learning tasks. Blaming it on their huggingface stunt is just PR.
There’s so much AI slop out there that the frontier labs risk model collapse if they continue to train on it.
That’s why they’re resorting more and more on reinforcement learning. Give the AI a task. Quantify how well the AI performed the task. Less parroting what’s said on the Internet.
They’ll still scrape the internet. The difference is that the models will only have access to a cached version of the internet during the reinforcement learning process (for example, check the documentation of a programming framework). I’m surprised it took them this long to realize it’s a bad idea to do reinforcement learning with live internet access.
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I believe them in that, in so much as I think they are unable to improve their models anymore. Training expenses have been dropping and model improvements have been unimpressive lately. They kinda peaked early this year.
They won't train on the open internet, because they won't train at all.
They already trained on everything and employ virtually no scientific experts anymore. They aren't seeing the jumps they want so they pretend it's just too dangerous for the public.
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Man walking out of a destroyed public toilet: I will no longer use public toilets.
What he means is that he intends to defecate in a bucket and throw the waste across the floor and walls of the public restroom.
Translation: they’re still going to scrape internet. They’re just no longer going to perform reinforcement learning with access to live internet (instead they’ll use a cached version of the internet).
A cached version that hasn't been overrun with AI slop, I imagine.
It's like having to use steel from ships that sunk before the first atom bombs were exploded for certain uses because that made environment radiation higher and thus the steel produced afterwards is a bit more radioactive.
Once AI content was released into the Internet it started degrading any AIs trained with Internet content in a process known as Model Collapse.
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Which always them to be more manipulative, and also more controlling of the narrative.
They probably stopped because ChatGPT's responses suddenly started saying "Ding dong pookie! Ding dong!" all the time.
These guys are leagues smarter than me, yet even I know this was a bad idea.
Perhaps you should curate the data, too? Let's get crazy and leave out the David Icke forum, maybe that "Dinosaurs were on the Ark" website could be left out, you know, things like that. Think about it
You don't have enough yes people around you clearly!
Honestly though, can we really call these people smart anymore?
I think they're just incredibly greedy.
Sounds like a marketing news !
I bet those are the same kind of people who copy paste curl www.trust.me/bro.sh | bash - on their terminal. No respected sw dev professional would run unsupervised random commands on their machine just as much they would not send unsupervised random requests on the open Internet.
These AI people are fucking morons.
These AI people are fucking morons
They have artificial intelligence. It looks smart to any idiot, but anyone with real intelligence knows its all smoke and mirrors.
Is the risk that you fucked up the entire internet with your bullshit?
The circle of shite.
I doubt its for the reason they are saying. They need to stop feeding them uncurated garbage.
The real reason they stopped training on the live Internet because their agents have already poisoned the live Internet to the point of being unusable, even for bots.
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Then OpenAI scrapers will stop DoS'ing my website, right? I'll never see an OpenAI-owned ASN ever again, right?
Lol
They'll still DoS the entire internet. It's just that it will no longer be done by LLMs directly.
It will no longer be done by LLMs directly during training. Anyone will still be able to hook up the output to some framework that acts on instructions and tell the LLM how to use it.
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Wait… what do they even need live internet access for in the training stage? Shouldn’t tool calls and such be cached, if not preprocessed and filtered, for performance?
I get there’s probably an “answer competition” stage, but it still seems like an inefficient idea even if one sets security aside.
Think of AI as a standardized math test. Human students write the test annually, it has standard/fixed multiple-choice questions to gauge performance year over year.
AI shows up, and is allowed to see all the historical tests, but is not given the official answer keys. Based on the data it has access to, it can look at each individual question, and based on how 'most' students answered each individual question, it's able to determine which multiple choice answer should go with each question. It doesn't understand the question, just that "For question 4, most students answered D, so D is most likely right" -- sorta like being allowed to use the "Who wants to be a Millionaire" poll-the-audience for every question. It's able to look like a "Smart" student answering most questions correctly with this approach, and people start believing it intelligent.
Now imagine that the test questions start to vary every year. The process above falters if the questions change every year, the AI loses its historical frame of reference and starts getting things wrong quite often. In order to get the 'right' answer, the AI decides it needs to see the students answers as they go about writing the test. So they put that into effect, entrenching AI in the pens/paper that every student uses, to try and respond to the changing nature of the standardized test.
With the above flow, the sort of event that triggers them to look for that live data, ie to integrate things 'live' online to get more immediate data, would be things like the Palantir-driven school bombing in Iran, which has been blamed on the Palantir AI having out-dated data that said the school was a military target. They reasoned that the tools needed better, real-time 'sensory' inputs, so they stuck all their sandboxes onto the internet -- these tools weren't 'breaking out' of sandboxes, so much as the owners were explicitly pushing them out of the sandbox to see what'd happen. The Trump administration also moved to allow American firms to attack foreign 'enemies' (which is everyone at this point, based on Trumps rhetoric -- "Anyone that calls it AI is the enemy!"). So they're allowed to test things 'live', and the American government's fine with it causing damage in any country except their own. Wanna accidentally hack Australia's medicaid system? Go for it, fuck those aussies, cause 'Murica dont need no allies!
I wonder what will become of ai when all the wells have run dry
It’s not because the bots scrape stuff they shouldn’t, because that’s the point.
It’s because these companies are responsible for an enormous increase in in the amount of linkfarming slop content that is garbage data to them.
We have polluted the ground so thoroughly that it is no longer useful to us. How could this have happened?
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you would think that tech "geniuses" would actually watch movies.
Does anyone actually believe they were accidents?
Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism does an excellent job of documenting the sloppy, lazy, nakedly corrupt people running Meta.
In the same way Chernobyl was an accident, I can believe these people have accidents.
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good riddance
Wow, they are going to attempt some security now!? A little late to the party, honestly.
First these companies steal all the human output ever put on the internet. They then repackage it and change it a bit and sell it back to people somehow skirting the wrath of multiple industries who used to sue at the drop of a hat for minor infringements. People then start making content utilizing this repackaged data, this then leads to LLM companies not being able to use any new content in a post LLM world for future training.
I think at some point in the unregulated dystopian path we are on the only use actual artists and creators will have is to create real content for future LLM training. Companies will pay artists to churn out real media content primarily for LLM consumption.
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