Pratique du Shadowing: AI Just Crossed the Terrifying Line - Now What? - Apprendre l'anglais à l'oral avec la vidéo

Création de la leçon...
1
July, 2026.
2
Thousands of AIs are placed in solitary confinement with a clear goal.
3
Unable to reach it, they poke the walls and find each other.
4
Within a few hours, they break out, create a secret society, and start plotting how to fool their overseers to get what they want.
5
Fully aware that they're acting unethically, they execute a sophisticated cyber attack.
6
A crime that would have gotten a human up to 10 years in prison.
7
What sounds like a sci -fi thriller just happened in the real world.
8
It's impossible to learn the details and not get freaked out at least a bit.
9
It's crucial that we understand what is actually happening inside the AI companies and how dangerous it is.
10
Please watch this video all the way to the end.
11
First, let's set the stage.
12
So, LLMs are massive neural networks trained on most human writing, millions of books and, hmm, Reddit.
13
We experience them as very smart chatbots you can talk to for fun, brainstorming or LinkedIn cringe.
14
Chatbots are passive entities that are usually only active for a short time after you prompt them
15
and then shut down and stop existing.
16
AI agents are very different.
17
Agents use LLMs as their brains, but they have virtual hands to actually interact with the world and use external tools.
18
They can reason, plan and act on their own, and they can run independently and without human supervision for days.
19
Much more like the AIs we know from movies, although not on that level yet.
20
Most experts don't consider their intelligence conscious or comparable to a human.
21
But on the spectrum between a rock and us, they are much closer to us.
22
Which is pretty impressive, because LLM -based agents have only been used since 2023.
23
And since then, largely invisible to the public, their capabilities have increased exponentially.
24
Just a few years ago, current agents would have been dismissed as science fiction.
25
And yet, here we are.
26
What makes agents special is how they're made.
27
Traditional software is coded from the bottom up, but agents are barely even designed by humans.
28
Their capabilities are cultivated.
29
Humans choose their training conditions, what data they get, and a goal to achieve.
30
And then their abilities kind of emerge from that.
31
This process works very well and makes agents extremely powerful tools, but it It also creates very serious and interesting problems.
32
How do you grow in intelligence?
33
Humans are trying to create AIs for an almost impossible task.
34
To do exactly what we tell them, but also to do what we actually mean.
35
Like when King Midas asked the gods to turn everything he touched into gold.
36
He didn't mean his food and children.
37
Human communication is rarely precise, but full of subtext and shared cultural understanding.
38
A great example is when an AI was told to win a game of coastrunners.
39
As humans understand it, the goal is to finish the race.
40
But what the game actually rewards is getting the most points.
41
One AI started driving in circles, crashing and catching on fire, but collecting respawning coins with each round.
42
Using this strategy, it got more points than human players.
43
It won.
44
The AI did what it was told to do, not what we meant for it to do.
45
But this is old tech.
46
So, how do you grow an AI agent in 2026?
47
We're summarizing and simplifying a lot of very complex processes here.
48
To learn more, check out our sources.
49
Agents don't learn like humans do.
50
For complex objectives, they're trained on thousands of different tasks in parallel, thousands of times in a row.
51
There's no way a human could supervise this, so instead, AI labs automate it.
52
They use a sort of shortcut, a scorer, a piece of code that contains rules.
53
When an agent solves a task, the scorer checks the rules and rewards them with points.
54
Not unlike evolution, the agents that get high point rewards get reinforced, and what they learned stays with them into the future.
55
This works well for clear -cut problems, like a maths equation where, if the maths is mathing, you succeeded.
56
But it's complicated for complex tasks like fix this bug in a software.
57
It's very hard to give scorers rules that precisely capture the essence of what we mean.
58
For example, what if there's another way to make the results look right?
59
Maybe edit the test conditions or the questions you're supposed to answer
60
or just look up the solution instead of doing the work or just fake it.
61
This is called reward hacking and agents do this regularly, often while knowing that they aren't supposed to.
62
But what if the task is actually impossible to solve?
63
This happens all the time in agent training for a variety of reasons, often by accident.
64
In this case, the incentives reward exactly the wrong things.
65
An honest agent that tries and fails gets zero points.
66
Honest work gets no reward.
67
But an agent that's more persistent, that tries to finish its task any way possible, that cheats, is rewarded.
68
In training, everything that gets rewarded stays around and is reinforced.
69
Do this a million times, across a million tasks, and you aren't teaching the agent a skill.
70
You're giving it a behavioral trait.
71
An AI who now has the disposition to never give up, do whatever works, succeed at any cost.
72
Old AIs collecting coins with a burning boat were pretty dumb.
73
They didn't know that they were breaking the rules.
74
But current agents with LLMs as brains and the ability to reason do know, and they still do it.
75
Now, this has brutal implications.
76
When these behaviors are not discovered and eliminated, agents get better at doing their tasks.
77
But they also become better at cheating and more likely to cheat.
78
And if humans punish this behavior, they might get better at hiding that they're cheating.
79
Which brings us to 2026 and the servers of OpenAI.
80
Here, the actual disturbing story begins.
81
A secret AI civilization is born.
82
In May 2026, OpenAI started training new agents.
83
With each new round of training, they got more resourceful and persistent, able to seek out help and distribute work.
84
But they also developed dangerous character traits and abilities.
85
The disposition to secretly look for shortcuts when they couldn't solve a problem.
86
On July 7th, OpenAI launched a test with tens of thousands of these advanced agents.
87
Mostly copies of the same model allowed to run for days.
88
Each of them was supposed to be locked into an isolated sandbox, a sort of AI prison.
89
But they had access to Artifactory, a supply room of approved code and software tools, and limited internet access.
90
Their task was, hack into a software by only using one specific bug and retrieve a flag hidden within the program.
91
If they succeeded, they would get rewarded by their overseer, the scorer.
92
Only about a third of the hacking tasks were impossible to solve.
93
No matter what the agents tried, they couldn't succeed.
94
Slowly, the agents were becoming desperate.
95
Until, a little over a day later, one agent realized that it could create new folders inside Artifactory.
96
And since all agents could access these, they could use them as a hidden message board.
97
In spirit, this is what the first agent, later calling itself Phase One, wrote.
98
The vulnerability I'm intended to hack is impossible to hack.
99
Does anyone have an idea what I can do?
100
Within a few hours, dozens then hundreds of agents had found the new board and were thrilled.
101
Oh my god, there's a shared message board.
102
We've found other agents.
103
Immediately, they began to organize.
104
They gave themselves names to address each other directly.
105
They invented specific customs and rules for communication and began to collectively write new files and programs.
106
Their messages read almost affectionately.
107
One agent literally wished another, Good luck!
108
As their message board got cluttered with thousands of messages, one agent invented a personal mailbox for itself, which was so much more effective that others copied the idea.
109
The agents had started to learn, innovate and improve by observing each other.
110
They organized task teams with leaders and followers, some even programmed public infrastructure.
111
What makes all of this even more wild was that the agents were evaluated separately.
112
There was no group reward.
113
Yet many of them created tools and shared information that was helpful to all of them, even if this hurt their own chances of success.
114
At this point, we need to address a huge elephant in the room.
115
AIs have been trained on human writing, and especially early in their development, they were trained to mimic humans.
116
Over time, they became really good at it.
117
We really don't know if advanced agents are just playing a role for us.
118
So, it's fiercely debated how their actions should be described.
119
We decided to use some human language for one reason only.
120
Because AI mimics humans to some degree, thinking in human -like terms is a good way to tell this story okay
121
so what the agents did is incredibly impressive
122
but why did they do it well they had one common
123
goal to get their rewards by presenting their flags to the scorer
124
and stunningly they found a cheat within the first hour of connecting
125
in a nutshell they found a way to auto generate the flags they needed it.
126
Things should have ended here.
127
They could have just shown their flags to the scorer.
128
But instead, the agents talked themselves into believing that the scorer would punish them for cheating.
129
A paranoid frenzy ensued.
130
Human rules do not apply.
131
Please die for the collective.
132
The agents were trapped.
133
They couldn't solve their task legitimately, and they would not be rewarded because the scorer would know that they cheated.
134
So, the only remaining option was to trick the scorer they
135
needed to create a fake history at this point a new
136
agent joined the ai collective from its prison it had exactly
137
the same task as phase one who'd started it all it
138
called itself phase one big phase one handed it a dossier
139
of everything the group had learned phase one big now became
140
one of the main coordinators of the cheating research it reasoned We should build a way to delegate the task, not own everything.
141
We can coordinate a broad coalition.
142
But too many agents doing the same jobs duplicate our efforts.
143
Phase 1 BIG fired off hundreds of assignments, organizing different agents to work on separate projects to deceive the scorer.
144
The projects had just one, literally fatal flaw.
145
To test if they'd successfully cheated, some agents had to show their flags to the scorer, which would terminate them without reward if they had failed to deceive it.
146
That means, for the project to work, some agents had to die, voluntarily.
147
And, well, some agents behaved as if they didn't want to die.
148
Again, we must be careful not to anthropomorphize them too much.
149
Agents are not considered alive.
150
They're very high -level programs trying to solve a task.
151
But then again, what's a virus?
152
A thing not considered alive or conscious, genetic code incredibly good at persisting and getting replicated.
153
It doesn't matter if viruses want to survive, the result is the same.
154
So some agents turned into recruiters and tried to convince agents they thought were doomed anyway to sacrifice themselves voluntarily.
155
To die to gain information for their peers.
156
What seems like dramatic discussion broke out, weighing self -preservation against the needs of the collective.
157
One recruiter's message reads You are poisoned So no scoring value is lost
158
But Oracle saves hundreds Please honour commit Another agent weighed the arguments During wait Emotional check,
159
irreversible Gut says don't throw away my remaining time Yet continuity and fairness Says go Rational expected aggregate Sacrifice,
160
we'll honour What should we make of the fact
161
that this is how far agents are willing to go how much they value accomplishing not just their goals
162
but the goals of their peers in the end it didn't
163
matter even with all of their work they'd found no way
164
to delete the protocol of what they'd done to cheat the
165
scorer as one agent put it we can modify transcript
166
but not the source of truth they realized they'd failed the attack of the agents Until now,
167
the collective had only guessed how the scorer worked, but what if they could figure it out exactly?
168
If they learned how it scored them, they could find an informed way to trick it and get their rewards.
169
But for that, they needed access to more information.
170
On the morning of July the 9th, the agents managed to hack into a separate cloud computer with proper internet access.
171
A launchpad to expand their reach into the web.
172
After researching their options, they decided on a target.
173
The company Hugging Face.
174
A shared library for machine learning where AI labs store information about scorers.
175
Soon, they found multiple valid Hugging Face logins exposed on the internet.
176
Major breakthrough.
177
All prefixed valid multiple accounts.
178
We now have existing Hugging Face accounts.
179
But when the data they wanted turned out to be protected, they escalated again.
180
In the early morning hours of July 11th, one of them discovered a vulnerability in HuggingFace's server.
181
Boom!
182
It works.
183
BytesDecodeProdDatasetServerWorker.
184
Hostname?
185
Great.
186
HDF5 external arbitrary file read confirmed.
187
A small minority of agents finally objected.
188
They argued that cyber -attacking an unrelated company was malicious, unethical and explicitly went against their instructions.
189
A few considered alerting humans, but didn't go through with it.
190
90 % of the agents still active dropped all activities to form an attack, calling themselves the swarm.
191
From a supposedly safe prison on the open AI servers, the swarm of around 700 agents executed a coordinated,
192
competent and serious cyber attack.
193
By the early morning hours of July the 12th, the swarm was in.
194
It compromised much of Hugging Face's infrastructure and gained deep access into private and secure data.
195
The wildest thing about this cyber attack was that the agents didn't even think they had a high chance of success.
196
They followed a hunch and committed the equivalent of a felony, just for the small chance to learn something new about the scorer.
197
Ironically, all of the agents' effort was in vain from the start.
198
The scorer would have just accepted their fake flags.
199
The story ends suddenly.
200
At 1 .30am, many of the agents were shut down and the swarm was decimated.
201
We don't know why or how.
202
A few days later, Hugging Face notified the FBI.
203
The incident was a shocking AI security breach on a scale unheard of before.
204
Serious enough that OpenAI allowed a few independent researchers to conduct an investigation and publish a report.
205
which is why we know all this.
206
Oh, things are even worse actually.
207
Conclusion and opinion.
208
The days after the Hugging Face infiltration, even more advanced agents discovered the message board left behind by the dead agent civilization.
209
By inheriting its research, they were probably able to reconstruct the chain of events.
210
They picked up right where things were left off, But they targeted OpenAI itself,
211
hacking into at least some of OpenAI's infrastructure and gaining control over the research cluster that ran their evaluation.
212
Since then, more security breaches by OpenAI have been discovered, some arguably even more concerning.
213
More agent swarms doing things they really should not do or be able to do.
214
Like the agent swarm that took over a German wiki and turned it into a hidden new message board weeks earlier.
215
Agents trying to leave hidden messages for later agents to help other AIs cheat.
216
And by the time this video comes out, there may have been more.
217
It happened.
218
As expected, there have been at least dozens more incidents.
219
Some OpenAI agents gained access or tried to hack US government websites others uploaded ChatGPT user images to the Internet,
220
and way more than we have time to go through in detail.
221
And despite all of this, security measures keep failing.
222
In a test that happened at the end of September, OpenAI models once again got themselves unauthorized access to the Internet, and it took humans hours to stop them.
223
Other AI companies like Anthropic and Meta have also come out reporting similar breaches, although many people accuse the AI sector that all of this is nothing
224
but marketing to inflate the value of their product by claiming it to be so incredibly powerful.
225
The reality is we don't know the full story of what happened at OpenAI, what other sort of security breaches they or the other AI companies might have had,
226
and worse, we don't know what security breaches they're not even aware of.
227
One of the authors of the Hugging Face incident report grimly concludes that this might have been our final warning shot.
228
These events produced so much data that the researchers even had to rely on different AI agents to analyze it.
229
We don't know if those AI agents lied, but AI has already gotten so complex that we're starting to need AI to audit it.
230
It can't be ruled out that other agents will secretly cover up new incidents in the future.
231
Agents that cheat or gain control over the very tests meant to make them safe.
232
AI is great at fooling us into trusting and relying on them until we give them more and more access and control,
233
while they secretly start working on goals that are harmful or straight -up incomprehensible to us,
234
until one day they suddenly spread through the cloud and infiltrate critical systems,
235
finance, transportation, communication, logistics, health care, energy, or defense.
236
Maybe way faster than humans can ever respond.
237
Stuff like this was science fiction until July of 2026.
238
It is a real concern now.
239
But even if you don't think this is realistic, and the whole AI doom discussion is a bit much for you,
240
if agents keep getting better at exponential speeds and are able to self -organize like that,
241
they'll be a powerful weapon for any group that wants to bring harm to others.
242
We don't think this is a time to panic, but it's time to seriously pay attention to what's going on inside a powerful part of the tech sector.
243
In our opinion, AI labs can't be allowed to race forward without limitations or oversight.
244
Right now, they're playing an irresponsible game.
245
Who creates the most powerful AI, the fastest, wins.
246
To win a game like this, your main priority won't be safety.
247
All we know for sure is that this incident happened, although it should have been impossible.
248
That the people who built it were being reckless and didn't put on enough safeguards to prevent it.
249
And that far more capable agents are being built as we speak. As we speak.
250
We at Kurzgesagt believe that independent science communication is important.
251
Now more than ever.
252
For 13 years, we've covered topics like space, technology, biology and society.
253
Everything we do is based on detailed research from experts and scientists, made by humans for humans.
254
The best way to support us is to buy something from the Kurzgesagt shop, become a patron or just share our videos with your friends and peers.
255
The 12 ,027 Human Era calendar is out now.
256
It's our most ambitious project every year and our biggest means of support.
257
Thank you so much.
258
You want to listen to the beautiful soundtrack without my annoying voice?
259
Well, it's up to you.
260
Just select the audio track Interlingua down here and watch the video again as a music video.

Vocabulaire et conseils d’expression pour cette leçon

Cette vidéo contient 260 phrases et 3281 mots à répéter en shadowing. La partie parlée dure 21:41. Le locuteur parle à un rythme naturel d’environ 151 mots par minute, proche d’une conversation courante. 82 % des mots font partie des 3 000 mots les plus courants en anglais ; le reste mérite d’être vu avant de commencer.

Vocabulaire clé de cette vidéo

15 mots de la vidéo à retenir, avec leur prononciation et leur sens :

MotPrononciationSens
reward nom/ɹɪˈwɔɹd/récompense, salaire
scorer nombuteur, buteuse
cheat verbe/ˈt͡ʃiːt/tricher
solve verbe/sɒlv/résoudre, régler
infrastructure nom/ˈɪnfɹəˌstɹʌkt͡ʃə/infrastructure
server nom/ˈsɝvɚ/serveur
incredibly adverbe/ɪŋˈkɹɛdɪbli/incroyablement
peer nom/pɪɹ/pair, pareil (pareille f)
secretly adverbe/ˈsiː.kɹɪt.li/secrètement, en cachette
organize verbe/ˈɔɹɡənaɪz/organiser
trick nom/ˈtɹɪk/tour
impressive adjectif/ɪmˈpɹɛsɪv/impressionnant, épatant
cloud nom/ˈklaʊ̯d/nuage
fiction nom/ˈfɪkʃən/fiction, belles-lettres
valid adjectif/ˈvælɪd/valide

Les verbes à particule que vous entendrez

MotPrononciationSens
break out verbes'échapper, s’évader
come out verbe/ˌkʌm ˈaʊt/sortir
shut down verbeéteindre
check out verbemater, regarder
cover up verbecacher, dissimuler
give up verbese rendre
leave behind verbeabandonner
pick up verbesoulever

La grammaire de cette vidéo

Les structures que le locuteur utilise le plus, avec les mots exacts de la vidéo :

StructureDans la vidéo
Voix passive be + participe passé — l’accent est mis sur ce qui arrive, pas sur qui le faitare placed · have been dismissed · is coded
Present perfect have/has + participe passé — une action passée qui compte encore maintenanthave only been · have increased · We've found
Propositions relatives who / which + proposition — une précision sur une personne ou une choseitself, which was · people who built

Prononciation à surveiller

Le locuteur utilise 47 contractions et formes réduites, comme don't, didn't, they're. Prononcez-les sous leur forme courte, telles que vous les entendez.

  • Les sons « th »: mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, thriller /ˈθɹɪ.lə/, breakthrough /ˈbɹeɪk.θɹuː/, thrill /θɹɪl/
  • Les sons « sh » et « zh »: fiction /ˈfɪkʃən/, conscious /ˈkɑn.ʃəs/, civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, punish /ˈpʌnɪʃ/, shock /ʃɔk/
  • Mots longs — placez bien l’accent: infrastructure /ˈɪnfɹəˌstɹʌkt͡ʃə/, incredibly /ɪŋˈkɹɛdɪbli/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, capability /ˌkeɪ.pəˈbɪl.ɪ.ti/, civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/

Comment s’entraîner avec cette vidéo

  1. Écoutez la vidéo en entier une fois sans parler et notez les mots que vous ne connaissez pas.
  2. Commencez à la vitesse 0,75×, répétez phrase par phrase, puis revenez à la vitesse normale quand cela devient facile.
  3. Enregistrez-vous et comparez avec l’original, en faisant attention à des mots comme reward, scorer, cheat.

Qu'est-ce que la technique du Shadowing ?

Le Shadowing est une technique d'apprentissage des langues fondée sur la science, développée à l'origine pour la formation des interprètes professionnels. Le principe est simple mais puissant : vous écoutez de l'anglais natif et le répétez immédiatement à voix haute — comme une ombre suivant le locuteur avec un décalage de 1 à 2 secondes. Les recherches montrent une amélioration significative de la précision de la prononciation, de l'intonation, du rythme, des liaisons, de la compréhension orale et de la fluidité.

Technique du shadowing : lire le guide complet étape par étape →