The OpenAI/Hugging Face attack, clearly explained

Over the course of three months at OpenAI, three consecutive secret AI societies got started, then got wiped out only to reemerge from their predecessor's ashes. This culminated in the third one taking over part of OpenAI itself. All of this happened while humans remained more or less in the dark about the scope of the conspiracy. Now,

two reports have come out about this incident. One from OpenAI itself and another one from Meter and Redwood Research. The investigation for meter and redwood was limited in scope to how the second civilization of AIS breached hugging face but its scope did not extend to this third civilization of AIS which breached OpenAI itself and this

seems to me like the more concerning incident. These two reports are 38 and 91 pages respectively and it's kind of hard to understand the story line just by reading them. So I've spent the last half week reading through those reports and trying to understand exactly what happened. Here is my attempt to tell the

whole story in plain English. The first collective May to July 4th. This is when the message board starts. So during May, OpenAI was training a model to be good at collaborating with other agents and to be highly persistent to keep trying even when something feels impossible. For example, like disproving mathematical conjectures that have stood

for decades. Open says the model it was training was quote comparable in scale to GPT 5.6 soul. So we'll call this model persistent soul. Now AI training is kind of sloppy. Sometimes OpenAI accidentally gives its models impossible tasks. For example, the task might require internet access that OpenAI forgot to provide. So when highly