Comment by medlazik
5 hours ago
AI marketing bullshit stunts are unlike anything I've seen in 30 years. It started with MS Copilot so called capabilities for work, which were completely made up use cases that didn't work at all (3 years later still). We've had OpenAI "AGI is coming" and "AI will take your job", now we have Mythos being so "dangerous" for cybersecurity, which of course makes the average Joe interpret it as Anthropic being "the better overall company, the NSA uses it!!". I mean gov foes with Anthropic are probably true, but the marketing is to blame not Mythos capabilities. This is all so fucking pathetic
> and "AI will take your job"
Don't forget, its no longer cool to say that now that the public has pushed back. The fact they all changed their tone away from taking jobs tells you that it was all just entirely marketing.
All the CEOs very quickly changed their messaging after Altman's house got molotoved.
Seems to me that they were mostly right, and the message was received by the right people. No need to ensure it gets distributed to the wrong people.
I haven’t heard anything about AGI in a long while. Oh yeah, and per conversations last Jan we were all supposed to be out of our jobs by now.
But the propaganda deluge was a smash hit so far, HN is drowning in “AI” BS, and astroturfers and spin doctors haven’t seen that much business since the cold war. They made more profit than shovel salesmen in the gold rush.
I was able to identify, diagnose, fix, and upstream a minor bug in and erlang/OTP ssh key implementation with Opus in maybe 20 minutes (+2 weeks or so for upstream). It is not impossible that I could have done this before, but it would have taken days or weeks. The actual fix was about 2 lines of code, hardly AI slop, but getting there would have been quite the slog, and I never would have done it.
There is a lot of the reason for AI skepticism out there, but people tend to do massive overcorrections and underestimate the force multiplier it can be, particularly for people with some idea of what they're doing and a good grasp of how to take advantage of the tool.
Force multiplier? Or low-hanging fruit pruner?
What is the difference when every problem becomes low-hanging fruit?
I said absolutely nothing about LLMs, which is a fantastic tool I'm using every day. I'm talking about marketing.
So let’s say you’re in Anthropic’s shoes. You see that LLM’s are getting better and better, and it’s very possible that they will have some impact on jobs in the next few years, and a very meaningful impact on cybersecurity.
Is it more ethical to stay silent about these concerns, as you might have a bit of self interest? Or even if it looks a bit self interested, is it better to warn people ahead of time? I think the latter is obviously the better position.
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The point I'm trying to make is Anthropic's marketing about broad security risk related to the capability of its models is a valid concern though their dog and pony show really overdid it, probably to the detriment of us all for many reasons. It is indeed amplifying the abilities of people to find and exploit security issues.
The point of my anecdote is I was able to identify and fix an at least security adjacent bug in a language I could charitably consider myself a novice in. It happened to very unlikely have a security impact, but that was mere chance. LLMs expand the pool of people able to find and exploit security problems and we're all considerably more vulnerable as a result.
The biggest security threat was always someone bored with $20, a lot of attacks could be ignored or at least not prioritized with that threat model. This isn't true any more and our attack surface has gotten a whole lot larger.
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> I was able to identify, diagnose, fix, ...
a link to the PR or Changelog would strengthen this comment that it actually happened?
The US has gone all in on AI because it is one of the few things in which they still have an advantage over Asian countries. I wouldn't use the word pathetic but rather "desperation".
So is your position that i.e. the Five Eyes [1] cyber security leaders are just pretending that AI cyber security is a serious thing to play into the geopolitical east vs. west thing and its not genuine?
It just feels like people are starting to reach for conspiracy theories rather than engage with the idea that these models might actually be dangerous.
[1]. https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5936339-ai-cybersecuri...
The “Five Eyes cyber security leaders” aren’t exactly famous for their political independence, or for having the public’s best interests at heart, or erring on the side of regulating less.
You don’t get very far in the spying profession with honesty.
We should seriously reframe this whole AI thing to "SI = simulated intelligence".
It's google in a box. Great achievement, makes knowledge work faster, but please stop bothering everyone else.
The Uber and Groupon people became billionaires, so the "Simulated Intelligence" folks will also achieve it. No need to worry and drown everyone in these bs stories only non-tech people believe.
Can you describe your experience using modern AI tools that led to this conclusion? It is hard for me to wrap my head around how my perception could be so different from someone else in presumably the same or similar profession. I'm not asking this in bad faith either but I think your getting downvoted because your comment comes off as a pretty strong assertion without giving details on how you got there.
A lot of effort is spent to make the "conversation" feel just like a human-to-human interaction. This is not a naturally occurring phenomenon due to the technology, but rather a feature carefully engineered by those companies in order to get people hooked. Then they have all these tiny nudges like the typing animations or the "thinking..." popups before the next chat message appears.
At some point you might have also noticed the over-use of emojis, the bolted-on jokes, and the tendency to always approve what the user says (even though they have toned that down after backslash). At some point too many people thought they were in a relationship with the chatbot, because it always encouraged and approved them, so they had to hotfix it.
It's a bunch of really dark psychological patterns that are carefully combined by very clever people in order to create the false illusion that the user is experiencing something deeper than an engineered simulation of human interaction.
I think the technology is really useful, but they are obviously not happy with simply replacing a google-like query interface, they want users to fall in love with the product and mentally treat it like a fellow human being - and that's what I think is insincere.
Heh. In the Schlock Mercenary universe, "SI" means "synthetic intelligence", which is a level below real AI (which means what we would call AGI). And, as it says (in https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2003-07-21), SI translates to "kinda stupid".
All for a product that has yet to make a single honest dollar in profit for anyone who isn't nvidia.
When this goes we might well see a recession. Not that anyone responsible will be worse off, of course.
The perpetrators all have their golden parachutes. The taxpayers will foot the bill.
The US is trillions in debt. We live in the age of magic- nobody foots the bill.
Why on earth would you expect any of them to take profit so early in the game?
Silly me, expecting a company worth a trillion dollars to make... some money. Any money. A single profitable product.
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