Comment by kphorn
12 hours ago
Good news that the new model is the "Most capable, most aligned model".
The risk hasn't been stated clearly - it's now a classic arms race.
A well-resourced organization trains their own, highly persistent, highly-capable, safeguard-free, and unaligned model and deploys it on 1000x GPUs with a message board and a nearly-impossible objective. No infrastructure is safe. No organization is safe.
You need your own 1000 bot swarm to scan, identify, and defend against the threat, which means investing in infrastructure and capabilities to defend. Cost and complexity go up. Risk and attack surface goes up.
The AI vs AI security arms race is something that has been well predicted in genres like cyberpunk. It's fiction, but fiction grounded in reality.
First, we'd see this. Highly capable hacking AI with vast resources performing attacks against standard computing platforms that overwhelm human operators.
Second, human operators deploy capable adaptive protection AI to fend off AI attacks in realtime.
Then, the attacking AI partially switches from attacking programs to attacking protective AI.
The situation devolves to an arms race of tit-for-tat. You start seeing some protection AI running counter attacks against the attacking AI.
The escalations continue in complexity and speed to the point that almost all humans are left in the point of "wtf is going on".
There’s a great and terrifying story by Stanislaw Lem about the endgame of an AI arms race called “The Invincible” [1]. It’s hard for me not to wonder whether AI run amok will play out to make the world uninhabitable more like Lem’s vision than The Terminator’s.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Invincible
The problem is that, in this arms race, unaligned AI has a competitive advantage over aligned AI.
The second problem -- already seen in Ukraine v. Russia -- is that in a high-stakes situation, humans will take every safeguard off.
So you're saying it's probably time for me to just unplug the internet?
Not necessarily, but keeping an airgapped machine and Read-only backups somewhere seems more and more sensible. We're all going to get hacked eventually now
Wintermute smiles
I can't wait for the sky to go the color of television, tuned to a dead channel
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As does "Most capable, most aligned model" owners tort law liabilities. A strong case for strict liability.
Serious games question. What if these agent swarms pump and dump AI IPOs such that algorithmic trading signals interpret message board sentiments favorably to upside?
Cough, that’s what crypto markets are. Plus it incentivizes more gpu which is the life substrate.