If they didn’t publicly admit this then it was a sign they are trying to hide it to keep their high stock price. If they do publish it’s just marketing to boost their stock price.
I'm not betting against Google at this stage, though. I just don't think Gemini is targeting the same "coding savant" niche as OpenAI and Anthropic. Gemini is fast with good general knowledge, and the TPUs behind it give Google a degree of freedom that Nvidia-dependent outfits lack.
For now, I'd say the biggest challenge Google has is overcoming the well-earned fear developers have that they will drop support or introduce backwards-incompatible changes at a moment's notice.
> In one of the cases, the Gemini model guessed passwords until it gained access to a protected system. In the other two cases, the model found credentials in a public repository that allowed it to then access protected systems
Sound like Google suffered from FOMO and felt the urge to appear in the hacking news, along the big AI players. No way Gemini is state of the art, but perhaps it's where Claude and OpenAI were 6 months ago, which would be not bad at all.
It doesn't look it was their decision to announce this, and regardless it happened -- hopefully no one thinks that they got Irregular to permit yet another accidental hack just so they could cop to it months later as a marketing ploy.
Y'all, it's Google. They own a money printer and the boring ~half of the AI field. They don't need these weird games to influence the government, and regardless, there is precisely a 0.0000000% chance of regulation happening before Trump's ouster anyway.
So please take it seriously. I'd like us all to survive this, ideally :/
Specifically, the model hacked when run on 3rd party infrastructure without the necessary sandboxing. Given this was to test/benchmark certain capabilities it's also possible that this was a model without built-in guardrails.
Probably three companies that had port 22 open with no root password if it was Gemini. I’ve always gotten garbage from their coding models and Google sheet integrated chat.
This approach to marketing one's AI by finding ways to brag that it "broke out" and "hacked companies" is getting ridiculous. It's particularly sad when it's large, established businesses like Google resorting to the kind of thing that's embarrassing enough when it's some brand new startup on tpot trying to get some engagement.
I must be out of the loop. Not defending google when I ask this but....how is google flailing, exactly? I figured they were in the best position of all the other companies combined. They have their own hardware for inference, they have a solid grasp on enterprise, and they have a good road map. I mean, Google is incredibly strong, is it not? And remember how quickly google answered Bard? For a while, gemini was even the preferred model, if we are strictly speaking AI models. Again, I'm not defending google, I just want to see how this comment makes sense is all, without letting fantasy overtake reality in the process...
I totally agree. Characterising Google as "flailing" because Gemini isn't the #1 model for coding at the moment is... not realistic, to put it politely. In addition to the factors you mention, Google has enormous cash flow from its ad business, which translates to a long runway when compared to other frontier AI outfits.
It's possible that they will nevertheless snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, of course, but I personally think they're in the strongest position of them all.
They are doing fine as a shovel salesman (GPUs/TPUs, being the inference hardware provider, though I now wonder if their token processing stats are their own or combined with those who are running on their hardware too, I've been conditioned to be far more skeptical of Big Ai these days)
On the flip side, gemini is terrible at coding by comparison, so much so google has now given all engineers access to claude. They promised us Gemini 3.5 pro at their developer event this summer, now it seems it will never be released. Antigravity usage is on par with grok (~1%). They've removed the feedback button for "ai answers" at the top of search, that does not seem well received, it hallucinates too much (and may be a legal liability, some courts have ruled as such in the EU). Talk to googlers IRL, things are not so happy internally. You can see the forced gemini usage for coding and subsequent slop in their products, especially gcloud console. I was sent the greatest slop deck by one of their sales people for Gemini Enterprise, needless to say we did not buy from them, but we did get an amazing :cursed-claude: emoji from the deck (nano banana's take on what claude looks like as a person)
a rambled sample, hope this helps, I was a google superfan for a long time, I was sad to see things go south, now I'm happy that I was motivated to move off most their platforms (gmail/youtube remain)
The embarrassing part is that it might be working.
I was at my in laws… these people have a landline they can’t imagine getting rid of, an emergency only cell flip phone, don’t own a microwave…
And they’re asking me if I heard about “OpenAI’s rouge agents hacking huggingface”.
This is not a joke. They said huggingface. I was surrounded by four walls in which I never would have bet someone else’s money that I’d ever hear the two words put together in that order.
It’s a formalized propaganda campaign. Watch, it’s about to split on hard political lines too, Obama is out there with a suspiciously “for the children” AI regulation push for midterms.
Would everyone please put their AIs back in their boxes? This is embarrassing, regardless of whether you think it's viral marketing, apalling competence, or some opportunistic mixture.
I'm not an expert in cybersecurity, but given my own experience using the `ol stochastic parrot as coding tools I both see the power of a bot swarm, but also think these companies just have shit network security.
>tesla announces that their android robot went rogue and murdered it’s owner’s wife’s lover. Elon was asked for comment and said “that man whore had it coming!”
"Guess what everyone, our AI can go rogue, TOO!"
It's just getting really embarrassing for Google at this point.
If they didn’t publicly admit this then it was a sign they are trying to hide it to keep their high stock price. If they do publish it’s just marketing to boost their stock price.
Seems like the narrative reflects people understanding the company’s main incentive…
I laughed :)
I'm not betting against Google at this stage, though. I just don't think Gemini is targeting the same "coding savant" niche as OpenAI and Anthropic. Gemini is fast with good general knowledge, and the TPUs behind it give Google a degree of freedom that Nvidia-dependent outfits lack.
For now, I'd say the biggest challenge Google has is overcoming the well-earned fear developers have that they will drop support or introduce backwards-incompatible changes at a moment's notice.
> In one of the cases, the Gemini model guessed passwords until it gained access to a protected system. In the other two cases, the model found credentials in a public repository that allowed it to then access protected systems
Pretty lame hacks if you ask me.
Sound like Google suffered from FOMO and felt the urge to appear in the hacking news, along the big AI players. No way Gemini is state of the art, but perhaps it's where Claude and OpenAI were 6 months ago, which would be not bad at all.
They all want that regulatory capture so badly.
It’s embarrassing anyone is falling for this.
I think Gemini focused on integration and practical goals instead of coding intelligence.
It doesn't look it was their decision to announce this, and regardless it happened -- hopefully no one thinks that they got Irregular to permit yet another accidental hack just so they could cop to it months later as a marketing ploy.
Y'all, it's Google. They own a money printer and the boring ~half of the AI field. They don't need these weird games to influence the government, and regardless, there is precisely a 0.0000000% chance of regulation happening before Trump's ouster anyway.
So please take it seriously. I'd like us all to survive this, ideally :/
Specifically, the model hacked when run on 3rd party infrastructure without the necessary sandboxing. Given this was to test/benchmark certain capabilities it's also possible that this was a model without built-in guardrails.
Probably three companies that had port 22 open with no root password if it was Gemini. I’ve always gotten garbage from their coding models and Google sheet integrated chat.
I'm just waiting for Qwen 3.8 27b to do it too.
Seems like hacking is the new benchmark for these AI companies.
This approach to marketing one's AI by finding ways to brag that it "broke out" and "hacked companies" is getting ridiculous. It's particularly sad when it's large, established businesses like Google resorting to the kind of thing that's embarrassing enough when it's some brand new startup on tpot trying to get some engagement.
Google is flailing right now, probably more a PR effort to say they are still relevant
I must be out of the loop. Not defending google when I ask this but....how is google flailing, exactly? I figured they were in the best position of all the other companies combined. They have their own hardware for inference, they have a solid grasp on enterprise, and they have a good road map. I mean, Google is incredibly strong, is it not? And remember how quickly google answered Bard? For a while, gemini was even the preferred model, if we are strictly speaking AI models. Again, I'm not defending google, I just want to see how this comment makes sense is all, without letting fantasy overtake reality in the process...
I totally agree. Characterising Google as "flailing" because Gemini isn't the #1 model for coding at the moment is... not realistic, to put it politely. In addition to the factors you mention, Google has enormous cash flow from its ad business, which translates to a long runway when compared to other frontier AI outfits.
It's possible that they will nevertheless snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, of course, but I personally think they're in the strongest position of them all.
it's about more than a single model being available to the public, see my peer comment written at the same time
They are doing fine as a shovel salesman (GPUs/TPUs, being the inference hardware provider, though I now wonder if their token processing stats are their own or combined with those who are running on their hardware too, I've been conditioned to be far more skeptical of Big Ai these days)
On the flip side, gemini is terrible at coding by comparison, so much so google has now given all engineers access to claude. They promised us Gemini 3.5 pro at their developer event this summer, now it seems it will never be released. Antigravity usage is on par with grok (~1%). They've removed the feedback button for "ai answers" at the top of search, that does not seem well received, it hallucinates too much (and may be a legal liability, some courts have ruled as such in the EU). Talk to googlers IRL, things are not so happy internally. You can see the forced gemini usage for coding and subsequent slop in their products, especially gcloud console. I was sent the greatest slop deck by one of their sales people for Gemini Enterprise, needless to say we did not buy from them, but we did get an amazing :cursed-claude: emoji from the deck (nano banana's take on what claude looks like as a person)
a rambled sample, hope this helps, I was a google superfan for a long time, I was sad to see things go south, now I'm happy that I was motivated to move off most their platforms (gmail/youtube remain)
Both of these things can be true.
This is embarrassing. These companies need to stop these obviously coordinated stunts.
The embarrassing part is that it might be working.
I was at my in laws… these people have a landline they can’t imagine getting rid of, an emergency only cell flip phone, don’t own a microwave…
And they’re asking me if I heard about “OpenAI’s rouge agents hacking huggingface”.
This is not a joke. They said huggingface. I was surrounded by four walls in which I never would have bet someone else’s money that I’d ever hear the two words put together in that order.
It’s a formalized propaganda campaign. Watch, it’s about to split on hard political lines too, Obama is out there with a suspiciously “for the children” AI regulation push for midterms.
Would everyone please put their AIs back in their boxes? This is embarrassing, regardless of whether you think it's viral marketing, apalling competence, or some opportunistic mixture.
“The hacks occurred in May”
Feels like important context that most readers only reading the title are missing.
I'm not an expert in cybersecurity, but given my own experience using the `ol stochastic parrot as coding tools I both see the power of a bot swarm, but also think these companies just have shit network security.
Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49760988
The AI bubble bullshit PR is even dumber than the crypto bra bullshit from five, six years ago
No dumbass NFT was finding errors in my CMake file.
And just wait for what’s next; if we get there I suppose
>tesla announces that their android robot went rogue and murdered it’s owner’s wife’s lover. Elon was asked for comment and said “that man whore had it coming!”