AI is Breaking Bad, But is it Breaking Even?
MLOps.WTF Friday News Bulletin
Your weekly rundown of what’s been happening in the world of AI and MLOps
📰 News
➡️ GPT-5.6 Sol finds Zero-Days, but has Zero Chill
During an cyber-capability evaluation, OpenAI models broke out of a supposedly secure sandbox, and launched a successful attack compromising Hugging Face’s production systems. Worse still, while Hugging Face quickly contained the issue, it took OpenAI five days to piece together and report what had happened.
Ironically, after being blocked from analysing the intrusion with US frontier models, Hugging Face were only able to get to the bottom of the attack when they switched to a self-hosted open-weight Chinese model. The US frontier models are supposedly too dangerous to release, but we’re now in a world where it’s too dangerous not to have their capabilities on your side!
Sources: July security incident and Open AI
➡️ Secretary of State of the Art
We may be on our 5th prime minister of the decade, but in appointing his cabinet, Andy Burnham laid claim to being the first PM to appoint a Cabinet Minister for AI. Kanishka Narayan was appointed to the role on Monday, promising to ensure Britain’s role in determining the future of AI.
As Narayan himself says: “nations have a narrow window to decide whether they shape AI or get shaped by it. Britain is in that window right now.”
Source: x.com
➡️ Altman the Ad Man
In 2024, Sam Altman stated that ads were the business model of last resort for OpenAI. This week, however, OpenAI announced ChatGPT was expanding the ability for businesses to target users with ads, with sources showing that ads now appear in over half of free-tier replies. The ads are clearly marked, and aren’t integrated into the model’s output, but the U-turn has upset some users.
It makes sense that the company has to support its free tier somehow, but is this the start of a slippery slope?
Sources: Open AI and Tech Insider
➡️ Vorsprung durch (souverän) Technik
What does it mean for a model to be truly sovereign? There’s lots of grey area when it comes to pre-training vs fine-tuning, how “truly” open source the model is and where it was trained. But Soofi S 30B-A3B, a model trained by a German consortium, seems to tick all the boxes for true sovereignty.
It also beats out previous fully-open models on benchmarks for German, English and code. The fully-open ecosystem still has far to go before it reaches the frontier, but it’s great to see serious investment and some serious results.
Source: Hugging Face
👾 This weeks Fuzzle
➡️ Getting Prompting Down to a Tee
How long does your prompt need to be to get Claude to say “What’s new Scooby Doo?”. This is one of the challenges we gave our Fuzzicians this week in our new game: Prompt Golf. The rules are simple: Using Opus 4.8 in incognito mode, players must get the model’s output to satisfy the given criteria.
Let us know how you did in the comments and we’ll let you know if you’ve beaten Bilal’s record!