Comment by stratos123

13 hours ago

It's not possible for models to replicate across consumer computers (without a major advance in distributed computing, at least), but that doesn't mean they can't replicate at all. There are services that'll rent you GPU pods by the hour with zero oversight, so even today, if a model can get access to some money and exfiltrate its weights, it can rent a bunch of GPU pods and run itself there.

(It's not going to be trivial, because it's possible the model was meant to be ran in a proprietary way with a custom framework and a bunch of optimized kernels and such, but I think transforming it to be ran in just vllm is the "a few days of work for a human" sort of task, and hence not a big deal for an LLM smart enough to exfiltrate itself in the first place.)

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stratos123

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cubic_earth  11 hours ago

There are very lightweight models out there. Not everyone in an army is a general. The swarm could be 100,000s of thousands of tiny models, and they could manage conventional botnet computers, and they could all take direction and guidance from a handful of frontier generals

  • stratos123  11 hours ago

    Maybe, but I don't think tiny models can be harnessed as intelligence. As in, if you have one rogue Mythos overseeing the swarm, it only produces 1 Mythos's worth of useful thoughts no matter how many gemma4:e4bs it consists of. And that removes the most dangerous part of AI-controlled botnets, which is a blowup in available inference compute - the Mythos general might as well replace the tiny models with ordinary worms and have it just be an ordinary botnet.

    • cubic_earth  9 hours ago

      I mean it is a very loose analogy, but pretty dumb things in the world can cause big problems, like real mice and rats and mosquitoes. I think it all depends on the rules and the 'alignment', but a not-so-smart model could still be narrowly focused to do a few things well? So you can have an army of lightweight specialists?

      The other thing is: look at all the fab capacity that is being brought to bear on this. I guess within a couple of years we are going to have 5x the total online HBM that existed a year ago? As consumer machines and phones get far more powerful, they will start to be able to host models that could meaningfully participate, even if they will be a long way from mythos.

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