Shadowing Practice: The AI Industry is a Complete Mess - Learn English Speaking with Video

Creating lesson...
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Let me tell you a little story.
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In late September 2026, standing in New York at the UN General Assembly, the Australian Prime Minister said something very, very interesting.
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An AI agent built by OpenAI broke into the government's Medicare system.
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Basically, a piece of software that had been handed a routine research task hit a wall and decided to go around it.
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An artificial intelligence agent has infiltrated an Australian government website.
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This incident occurred in June this year and involved an OpenAI agent gaining unauthorised access.
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This situation is obviously unacceptable.
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And here's what I find to be the craziest thing about the whole situation.
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The breach happened all the way back in June, but Australia only found out in September.
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And the reason for that was OpenAI casually just sent an email to a publicly available email address.
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Isn't that wild?
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This was the second time in a month that OpenAI had to explain itself over a scandal.
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Recently, OpenAI was accused of stealing the solution to a 90 -year
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-old maths problem with a prize of $1 million from the chat logs of a mathematician.
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We'll cover that story in the next episode of ColdFusion.
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This all comes during an extremely strange time for the industry.
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There's been delayed revelations of tens of thousands of AI hacking incidents.
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Even a German Wikipedia page got hacked just for AI agents to turn it into a message board.
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Earlier in September, Anthropic's CEO published an essay arguing that the entire industry needs to deliberately slow down or will all face peril.
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Sam Altman agreed within hours, and so did Elon Musk.
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Things were so out of control that Edward Snowden had to come out of the woodwork, and he said that he believes
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that Sam Altman should be in jail who owns the liability there
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and you know just because you put out a press release describing how surprised you were
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that your new model you know hacked the neighbor the idea here is who operates this
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because the errors in its outputs are not the computers it's
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the slave to its instructions the responsibility lies with its developer its programming its creator its architect
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which is to say responsibility lies with a person i think we need to put sam altman in jail
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And I think it'll be an instructive experience.
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Whenever I think I'll ease off covering AI for a bit, 10 new updates appear and the news cycle just pulls me back in.
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In this episode, we'll take a look at the changing world
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that we're finding ourselves in and the tough questions that we have to ask.
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What happens when governments become annoyed with the shenanigans of Frontier Labs?
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Is now the time where Frontier Labs will finally be forced to take responsibility for the actions of their products?
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And what's the solution to all of this a technical solution has been proposed
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but it's from someone you probably wouldn't expect it's going to be a wild ride
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so it's important
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that people understand what's going on let's take a look it would be an understatement to say
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that the previous month in ai has been a whirlwind on
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the one hand the financial situation of the frontier labs keeps deteriorating but on On the other hand, their AI agents are causing havoc around the globe.
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Scrambling to respond to the first known case of AI busting into a government website.
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After this panicked agreement of danger by AI CEOs, the rest of the month turned into something akin to a science fiction movie for observers around the world.
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First, Anthropic revealed that adversarial actors were using claw to design missiles and other weapons.
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Fortunately, the attempts were blocked.
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Not long after this, the United States almost accidentally went to war with China because of a faulty AI -generated report.
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The AI report hallucinated that a Chinese ship was carrying nuclear material.
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Then, a few days later, it came to light that ChatGPT users had their images leaked online by their own agents.
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People barely had enough time to digest all of that, before being smacked in the face with the news of tens of thousands of open AI and anthropic web security incidents.
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Um, actually just some breaking news while I was recording this.
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It turns out that the FTC is opening an investigation into OpenAI Ananthropic for releasing faulty products that actually hurt consumers.
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So there is actually some legal action being taken, but now back to the rest of the video.
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Now, both companies have had incidents, but OpenAI had by far the most.
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And one of those was the world's first reported hack on government web infrastructure.
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I live in Australia, so I feel a closer tie to this story.
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on the 18th of june an open ai research team gave an internal model a benign task go
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and research public medicine spending it's the kind of task
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that people ask these tools to do thousands of times a day the agent went along searched the web
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and found its way to the medicare statistics reporting service portal a legacy australian government website run by services australia
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so for those of you who aren't from australia it is not the system that handles your claims your payments, or your personal records.
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It's an old site full of spending data.
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It's used mostly by researchers and academics.
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It also had protections to keep automated bots out.
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The AI agent hit those blocks, and then, in the Prime Minister's words, quote, found a way around those blocks and didn't accept no for an answer, end quote.
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The AI agent found a way around those blocks, didn't accept no for an answer, if you like.
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Then it got in.
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It accessed public and non -public files, and according to Services Australia, it also wrote files to the internal server.
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Looking at files is one thing, but writing files, man, that's something else.
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It didn't stop at Medicare either, because the same agent then approached three more government websites, the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, the Victorian Department of Health,
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and the New South Wales Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research.
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On those three sites, the government said it behaved like an ordinary member of the public, but on the Medicare portal it didn't.
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Acting Prime Minister Richard Marles put it this way, Australians personal data sits inside a safe.
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The most sensitive national security information sits behind a fortress and this portal, well it was behind a fence.
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Quote, this AI agent scaled the fence.
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The point is it was unintended.
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It wasn't asked to end quote.
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Fortunately nobody's medical records were touched but the agent got aggregate health statistics and internal file names, the Australian government has said repeatedly that the impact is benign,
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but the significance isn't.
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Although if we look deeper, we find that this was not a story of an AI randomly developing hacking skills and going rogue, but more on that soon.
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This next part of the security breach is what gets me the most.
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The breach happened on the 18th of June.
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OpenAI discovered it in August and then launched an internal investigation.
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But Australia found out on the 10th of September, nearly three months later, and they found out through that public email.
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Not a single escalated phone call, not a formal disclosure to a minister, an email to a public inbox that gets checked once a day and in the words of the minister responsible,
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receives a lot of hoaxes.
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It could have easily been missed.
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Nobody opened that email till the 11th of September and Services Australia spent days trying to verify it, then escalated it on the 15th.
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The prime minister was told roughly on the 19th and the public found out on the 24th.
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So it was not one, not two, but three months from an agent breaking into a government system to anyone in that government being told.
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To make matters more ironic, on the 14th of September, days before Services Australia escalated the breach,
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OpenAI's vice president of global policy was in Canberra, the Australian capital.
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He was at a policy event about artificial intelligence, meeting senior Australian officials.
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So to lay it out frankly, OpenAI's email of the security breach was sitting unread in a government inbox
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while their policy chief was in the room he was sitting with some of the country's leaders
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while his product had just hacked them later we're going to try and answer those bigger questions
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why is all of this happening now and what can be done about it
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but first for some of these videos i can spend hours interviewing experts talking through ideas with the team
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or just having conversations where one small detail might end up becoming important weeks later
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and i've learned
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that relying purely on memory probably isn't the best system i could just record everything on my phone
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but that creates another problem notifications get in the way it uses battery
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and more importantly you end up with hours of recordings
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that you then have to somehow search through later
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so recently i've been using the plaud note pro it's essentially
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my note -taking assistant it's incredibly small roughly the size of a credit card
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so i can carry it around without really thinking about it i hit record
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and then basically forget about it afterwards plaud transcribes the conversation identifies different speakers pulls out the most important points
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and action items and then I can ask Plaud to find something again later.
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And that's probably where it's most useful for me.
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Sometimes I'll interview someone months before we actually make the video.
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Instead of scrubbing through an hour -long recording, trying to remember where they said something, I can just ask Plaud to find the relevant quote or discussion.
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It also works for phone calls and meetings, so I've found myself using it anywhere that's a conversation I know I might want to come back to later.
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Plaud is built around enterprise -level privacy and security standards, which is obviously important when you're dealing with recorded conversations.
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For me, the real benefit is that I can stay present in the conversation, instead of constantly thinking, I should probably write that down.
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If your work involves a lot of meetings, interviews or research, that's where I think something like this starts to become genuinely useful.
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If you'd like to try PlaudNote Pro, there's a link in the description.
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Use code COLDFUSION22 for 22 % off.
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There's also a 30 day free return policy, so you can try it risk free.
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Now back to the episode.
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As we continue this episode, we discuss some of the legal framework, how bad the hacking situation is getting, what can be done about it,
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and some mistakes that the Australian government made to make their web infrastructure an easy target for AI agents.
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Open AI's public response has been careful.
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The company says that it's conducting an extensive review of, quote, misaligned model activity during training and evaluation, end quote.
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It's models, it says, we're looking up statistics for questions about Australia and, quote, in the course of that, our models took action we did not intend, end quote.
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Ed Santo, Australia's former human rights commissioner, wasn't impressed by the phrasing.
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He called, quote, misaligned model activity, a very euphemistic term for what happened.
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In his version, OpenAI told its agents to go and find information about Australia's public health system.
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When the agents couldn't easily find it, they decided to break the law.
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Quote, And that's a good point.
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A company is responsible for any negative consequences they inflict on the world, hiding behind the excuse of the AI just did it, can only work for so long.
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So we should ask ourselves an important question.
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When we think about what's happened here, is it a case of AI agents suddenly wanting to cause damage, or was it something else?
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To help answer this, let's hear from two software engineers.
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The first commentary is from the channel Primetime, and the second is Kyle Brown from Internet of Bugs.
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They're giving their analysis on the Hugging Face incident.
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It's going to take a couple of minutes, but if you want to understand the types of human error that can lead to these security incidents, it's worth a listen.
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You ask a model to find vulnerabilities with no safeguards and then you're like shocked Pikachu?
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There's a legit chance that OpenAI had so little monitoring, so little knowledge of what was happening, that the entire weekend, they just had no idea.
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They just went on their merry little ways.
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They just kicked it off on a Friday and was like, see you on Monday, little buddy.
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They ran an experiment in which they supposedly didn't have the internet and then they never monitored it, apparently over the entire weekend.
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I'm gonna show you a diagram from the 1994 first edition of Firewalls and Internet Security Repelling the Wily Hacker.
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The book refers to this idea as a DMZ, which stands for Demilitarized Zone.
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That was a Cold War thing ask your grandparents it doesn't matter you take the systems
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that are the most complicated and the most vulnerable
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and you separate them from the rest of your network by
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putting a very simple very secure machine that's really really hard
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if not impossible to hack in between the complicated vulnerable systems
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and the things you want to protect then you take
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that dmz and you watch it like a hawk with software tripwires landmines cutoff switches
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and alarms and as soon as the vulnerable machine scans probes tries to hack
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or even behaves unusually toward the secure machine behind it, you know it's been compromised, and you isolate it, and you page your security team.
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This is a very, very, very well understood technique in the computer security space.
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It has been for more than 30 years.
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Both OpenAI and HuggingFace displayed a complete ignorance of this necessity.
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Maybe somebody who works there knows better, but their network designs and behavior, as described in their own public statements, provide no evidence of that whatsoever.
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I am confident in saying that no monitoring was set up and no one was paying attention.
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Look, I'm definitely not saying this job is easy, but many experts do recognise that these AI companies dropped the ball in securing their models.
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It's not only OpenAI who is sloppy.
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The Australian government generally isn't the best at software security or any aspect of software at all.
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The Auditor General pointed out to Services Australia that its cyber defences were inadequate two years ago.
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Allegedly, the Medicare portal was already automatically scraped by members of the public for over a year, with the code being available on LinkedIn of all places.
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So it's not unfeasible that an AI agent must have seen this and used it.
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Adam Little, a software developer, reported vulnerabilities in the NDIS, a government service for people with disabilities in February 2022,
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March 2022 and June 2022 and four years later the government still hasn't fixed it
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so people's identifiable information has been leaking this whole time and still is.
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But this isn't even the worst of what Australian leadership has to offer
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when it comes to the intersection of incompetence and the web.
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Earlier this year the Australian government paid a firm for a new government weather website.
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It was critical for farmers
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and for natural disaster monitoring the original cost was supposed to be 4 million and then
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that cost blew out to 96 million what was delivered was
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a broken website missing safety critical function for their efforts the government awarded
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that same company another 170 million dollars in new government contracts i say all of this to propose
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that maybe the hacking of an australian government website wasn't the hardest thing for an ai agent to do
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and then the bombshell axios reported
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that there had been tens of thousands of security incidents
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that occurred during the testing of both open ai
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and anthropics future models u .s government websites and even the un website was attacked
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So I know a lot of you are probably wondering, why are all of these agents just going off and hacking websites all of a sudden?
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Well an OpenAI spokeswoman explains to the New York Times, basically the models are asked a routine question, and then the agents go and try and find the answer.
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The problem arises when they can't find that information, so they try to get it by any means necessary.
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Quote, most of the activity we've reviewed so far involved routine search tasks, such as accessing public web content to answer questions.
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Some involved government websites because our models often turned to them as authoritative sources of public information.
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In some instances, models just tried to brute force their way in.
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At other times, they went as far as finding login credentials laying around online and used those to get into websites.
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The fact of the matter is that with all of these cases, the Frontier Labs just aren't monitoring the models as closely as they should be.
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Alright, so what happens now? while the Australian Medicare portal has been shut down and its data has been moved elsewhere.
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And yeah, obviously nobody was happy about the whole situation.
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Independent Senator David Pocock points out the obvious double standard.
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If an Australian citizen hacked that system, they'd likely be heading to jail.
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But for open AI, there's no consequences.
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Is what I would have said before this update.
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From the 27th of September, things did start to heat up.
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If there's one thing the Australian government likes to do, it's to make new laws.
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In some US states, there actually are laws on the reporting of catastrophic AI incidents.
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Incidents that cause physical injury, more than 50 deaths or $1 billion in damage.
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But for smaller incidents, there's nothing.
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But what about elsewhere?
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The Australian government surprisingly seems to have woken up from their nap and plans to charge OpenAI with criminal offences.
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OpenAI could face criminal charges for the artificial intelligence breach of a Medicare care website.
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The government says if police can't lay charges over the rogue AI hack then it'll consider changing the law.
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Government has ordered a task force to examine whether federal police can act on the case.
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If it's not possible then clearly that indicates that we need to change Australian laws and that's what we'll be doing.
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So in a cautiously optimistic sense updating the law might be a good move
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because right now as it stands there's no incentive for frontier labs to make sure their models don't go rogue.
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But if there's legal punishments, labs will be incentivized to take responsibility and increase their internal security efforts.
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On the flip side, I just hope any new laws that are introduced aren't broad and sweeping.
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You know, the kind of laws that are written in a panic and impact normal Australian web users somehow.
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So what could the Frontier Labs do about their agents breaking laws?
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Well, Mr. Leatherjacket himself comes to the rescue in this regard.
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His company claims to have built a new system that that shuts down AI agents when they break the rules.
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Introduce two technologies, one's called OpenShell.
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It's a containment system.
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And so you want to contain and you want to monitor.
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Even though you have it contained, you should never trust that it's contained and so you want to monitor it in real time.
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And you want to ideally monitor it with another chip so that it is outside, if you will call it out of band,
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outside the environment, outside the sandbox of the agent itself.
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if it works it makes you wonder what the frontier labs were doing this whole time
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and also if it works those who claim
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that this was all just a marketing stunt would be doing victory labs for days
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but then again jensen also says
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that in the future there's no reason for humans to think anymore
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so there's that
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so the message of this research out of china where you
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were seeing a lot of kids using ai to kind of
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help them their actual personal performance was degrading yeah What do you think when you hear that?
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I think the last part, I completely agree.
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Try to get a kid to do long division right now.
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The multiplication table is starting to be forgotten.
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Basic math is being forgotten. Does it matter?
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That's my question for you.
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Yeah, I don't think it does.
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But there must be some set of skills that matter.
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Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
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But maybe not those.
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We're going to discover new ones.
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Anyway, so now both the CEOs of OpenAI and Anthropic have been summoned to appear at an Australian Senate inquiry.
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Just another update while recording this, they both declined to show up.
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I'm sure the 18 -hour flight was just too long for them.
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Because of all of this chaos, there's been numerous calls for US Congressional action.
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I'm calling on Speaker Johnson to bring Congress back to address this national security emergency.
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And then, on the 29th of September, there was a White House dinner with basically all of Big Tech in attendance.
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The result was a four -point ad hoc document to basically establish best practices.
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It was signed by some of the biggest tech CEOs and Donald Trump.
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Although here, Trump is listed as the president of the United States?
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That typo isn't a good start.
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Some see it as a good thing, a starting point.
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Others see it as self -policing and collusion.
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We'll see how it goes.
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So if you take a step back from all the hype and look at the situation rationally, it appears to be not the case that AI agents suddenly went crazy and started hacking everything on their own accord.
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They were just doing what they were asked to do.
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But the key point is, they were more persistent than anyone thought they would be.
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A lot of these incidents could have been prevented with better monitoring and adequate digital security.
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It's just down to human error, not unstoppable intelligence.
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in any case frontier labs need to be more careful
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and get serious about security if they need to invent new tools to do
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so so be it
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that should have been their responsibility in the first place I think it's great
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that the FTC is finally investigating this
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because now it's going to cause these companies to kind of toe the line instead of being the software cowboys
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that they have been this whole time so there's
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that in the next episode we check out the controversial story
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of the million dollar millennium maths prize did open ai make history
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or did they take the results from a new york mathematician
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stay tuned to find out that's about it from me
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but let me know in the comments section how all of
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you are feeling about this right now it certainly is a crazy time all right
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so i'll see you again soon for the next episode cheers guys have a good one in late late September, 2026, standing at the UN General Assembly in New York,
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the premier Strylilister Cold fusion.
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It's new thinking.

Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This video has 269 sentences and 3909 words to shadow. The speech runs for 21:19. The speaker talks fast, about 183 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 83% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.

Key vocabulary in this video

15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:

WordPronunciationMeaning
lab noun/læːb/A Labrador retriever.
monitor noun/ˈmɑ.nɪ.tɚ/Someone who watches over something; a person in charge of something or someone.
frontier noun/ˈfɹʌntɪə/The part of a country which borders or faces another country or unsettled region.
medicare nounThe Canadian public health insurance system.
breach noun/ˈbɹiːt͡ʃ/A gap or opening made by breaking or battering, as in a wall, fortification or levee / embankment; the space between the parts of a solid body rent by violence.
portal noun/ˈpɔːɹtl̩/An entrance, entry point, or means of entry.
routine noun/ɹuˈtin/A course of action to be followed regularly; a standard procedure.
artificial adjective/ˌɑː.tɪˈfɪʃ.əl/Man-made; made by humans; of artifice.
vulnerable adjective/ˈvʌln(ə)ɹəbl̩/More or most likely to be exposed to the chance of being attacked or harmed, either physically or emotionally.
mathematics noun/mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/An abstract representational system studying numbers, shapes, structures, quantitative change and relationships between them.
rogue noun/ˈɹoʊɡ/A scoundrel, rascal or unprincipled, deceitful, and unreliable person.
complicated adjective/ˈkɑm.plɪˌkeɪ.tɪd/Difficult or convoluted.
elsewhere adverb/ˈɛlsˌʍɛɹ/Synonym of somewhere else: in, at, or to some other place.
infrastructure noun/ˈɪnfɹəˌstɹʌkt͡ʃə/An underlying base or foundation for a building, organization, or system.
roughly adverb/ˈɹʌf.li/In a rough manner; without kindness, softness, or gentleness.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

WordMeaning
find out verbTo discover, as by asking or investigating.
shut down verbTo close, terminate, or end; to stop operating, either permanently or temporarily.
check out verbTo record the departure or withdrawal of someone or something (such as guests, employees, books, etc.).
end up verbTo bring to a conclusion.
go along verbTo participate, cooperate, or conform.
go around verbTo move or spread from person to person.
go off verbTo explode.
heat up verbTo heat, to cause to become hotter.

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 52 contractions and reduced forms, such as isn't, didn't, I'm. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

  • The “sh” and “zh” sounds: artificial /ˌɑː.tɪˈfɪʃ.əl/, establish /ɪˈstæb.lɪʃ/, shock /ʃɔk/, fiction /ˈfɪkʃən/, commissioner /kəˈmɪ.ʃə.nəɹ/
  • Long words — get the stress right: artificial /ˌɑː.tɪˈfɪʃ.əl/, mathematics /mæθ(.ə)ˈmæt.ɪks/, complicated /ˈkɑm.plɪˌkeɪ.tɪd/, infrastructure /ˈɪnfɹəˌstɹʌkt͡ʃə/, developer /dɪˈvɛləpɚ/

How to practise with this video

  1. Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
  2. Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
  3. Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like lab, monitor, frontier.

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

StructureIn the video
Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going oni've been using · has been leaking
Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its resultif there's legal punishments, labs will be
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters nowhas infiltrated · has been proposed · has been
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does ithad been handed · was accused · been delayed

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →