Comment by fofoz
16 hours ago
It appears frontier labs has no plans in place to deal with the possibility of a model self-replicating outside the bubble. If that happens and the model manages to spread to other systems, we'll have to shut down the entire Internet to eradicate it and its artifacts.
I suspect the labs are relying on frictions such as the models being extremely large (e.g. 2TB for a 2T parameter model, making exfiltration more difficult) and also not yet displaying any desire to survive or self-replicate beyond their immediate task (that we know of).
We don't even know what those immediate tasks are. And given the evident spectacular ineptitude of their keepers, I doubt they can be trusted to know either. We could be one prompt injection attack away from internet-wide catastrophe.
This is just super unlikely to occur in the near term compared to some of these other risks. It's not like an instance of fable could just introspect into itself and pull out the weights. Model weights are stored encrypted and are highly protected, considering that they're targets for corporate and state espionage.
We'd basically need frontier models to be superhuman hackers before this would be a risk. Do we have any evidence of this? Are they gaining access to systems they shouldn't have access to?
Or I suppose the other way this could happen is if OpenAI have terrible sandboxing, but they seem to be taking safety seriously.
Distillation is a thing.
Their plan, I shit you not... Is literally to develop the intelligence capabilities and ask the more powerful models how to do deal with things.