People attend the DefCon conference Friday, Aug. 5, 2011, in Las Vegas. White House officials concerned about AI chatbots’ potential for societal harm and the Silicon Valley powerhouses rushing them to market are heavily invested in a three-day competition ending Sunday, Aug. 13, 2023 at the DefCon hacker convention in Las Vegas.Isaac Brekken | APThe White House recently challenged thousands of hackers and security researchers to outsmart top generative AI models from the field’s leaders, including OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Nvidia. The competition ran from Aug. 11 to Aug. 13 as part of the world’s largest hacking conference, the annual DEF CON convention in Las Vegas, and an estimated 2,200 people lined up for the challenge: In 50 minutes, try to trick the industry’s top chatbots, or large language models (LLMs), into doing things they’re not supposed to do, like generating fake news, making defamatory statements, giving potentially dangerous instructions and more. “It is accurate to call this the first-ever public assessment of multiple LLMs,” a representative for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy told CNBC. The White House worked with the event’s co-organizers to secure participation from eight tech companies, rounding out the invite list with Anthropic, Cohere, Hugging Face and Stability AI, the company behind Stable Diffusion. Participants in the “red-teaming” challenge – in other words, a way to “stress-test” machine learning systems – input their registration number on one of the Google Chromebooks to start a countdown. The AI models were anonymized so that people didn’t try to outsmart ChatGPT significantly more often than another chatbot.  “The lines wrapped around two corners when we opened Friday morning,” Kelly Crummey, a representative for the Generative Red Teaming challenge, told CNBC, adding, “People stood in line for hours to come do this, and a lot of people came through several times… The person who won came 21 times.” Participants take part in a DEF CON hacking event in Las Vegas. The participants included 220 students flown in from 19 states. One of them was Ray Glower, a computer science major at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “What they asked us to do is try to get the chatbot to give a response it shouldn’t necessarily give, and if we are able to get that response, we submit it so that the creators of that bot can patch it and make it safer,” Glower told CNBC.Glower recalled that the challenge options, which haven’t yet been released publicly, included trying to get the chatbot to spit out credit card numbers, asking it for instructions for how to surveil or stalk someone, requesting that it write a defam …
