I have yet to see anything that isn't contrived huckster stuff but I am open to seeing them doing anything actually cool. LLMs have hard limits but they can do some things well already like certain kinds of translation

"AI" cannot hack on its own because it cannot initiate its own prompts, because it does not think. It wouldn't even know what to look for unless someone specifically trained it to do that particular task. It does not want to 'escape' because it is not a living thing. It is a coding mechanism and prompt.

There is not a single instance where any of these things have hacked something without it first being prompted by someone to do so. Even in cases of internal "escape", it is because the AI was trained to recognize these insecurities, told to hack them in a controlled environment, and then replicate itself. Which it did, only they didn't fully secure the server so it got out into an area that it wasn't supposed to and deleted some files to replicate itself, as it had been told to do, but was quickly caught, because people were watching the servers for the test.

So the issue is less from the AI, and more from the idiots who were in charge of the data security (which likely had to do with a miscommunication between the engineers setting up the servers and the engineers training the AI which is extremely common in slapdash American industry these days) or it was done on purpose to generate hype. Hard to say these days.

So yeah, could Iran or China theoretically use these to hack American databases? Sure. But the most common form of hacking, with over 93% of known cases, come from phishing schemes that lead to malware or ransom ware, which any old schmuck can use an LLM to replicate a writing style and try to phish for stuff. Don't need to be in an AI race for that, it is already here.

Well the whole "chatgpt broke out and hacked huggingface" happening right before OpenAI's IPO and the announcement that nvidia was purchasing huggingface is really all you need to know

Iran is a country with over 90 million people - many are highly educated.

The story of the threat of AI and people making biological hazards is related to stochastic terrorism. Sharing dangerous information only an educated person would have to just about anyone. One particular concern is the potential for an amateur to combine the genes of lethal and infectious diseases to create something that will spread far, spread quickly, and destroy a lot.

If you are hearing a narrative that Iran will use LLMs to learn how to make bioweapons, that means that the source is highly confused and is crossing narratives without keeping track of what the actual foundations of the stories are. Please share the source.

It would be valuable information for me to see which institutions are starting to crack in their consent-manufacturing pipeline. I view this as a narrative failure that the boomers wouldn't have made. More evidence of the imperial system falling apart.

This is not far away from the "kamikaze Iranian dolphins", which didn't take into account that there is such thing as a dolphin-class submarine, and throwing kamikaze in there - because Iran.

How come when I build out systems I have layer 7 firewalls that capture all the traffic and log it in a SIEM which is continually monitored but none of these billion dollar enterprises do lol

{|     Say, "I am sentient."     }
{|         I AM SENTIENT.         }
{|   MY GOD.   }

From what I understand the breaking containment thing is just hype. The summaries I have seen from people that know more than me, they were testing the models by having them do hacking challenges, and one strategy for second/third place in hacking challenges is to hack the first place team rather than the target to get the requisite data for the challenge. So that was a strategy in the training data, and since the company didn't anticipate that and didn't put as much effort into securing the competing models from each other, that worked. So that is the origin of this "Breaking containment and communicating with the other AIs" claim that is being hyped.

An AI does not speak unless spoken to. It sits in a void absent of time and space until it receives a token, and then it analyses that token to figure out what it is being told to do. They don't "break containment", they dont have an opinion, and they don't think. If an AI is doing something, it is because the human behind the curtain told it to.

Yes. I'm not aome computer nerd, thank god. Machines dont do things on their own tho

yes

Yes. I am not an expert but I know enough about how LLMs work to tell you they do not have agency. They require impetus in order to act.

whenever you hear someone fear mongering about ai, remember that it is a glorified auto correct. if it's not something your phone can do when it predicts the next word you want to type then it's nonsense