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Comment by nusl

9 hours ago

Do models even know their own weights to be able to do this?

No, just as you don't know the neurons of your own brain.

I think OP is hoping that an LLM might be willing to hack its own provider (as per the hugging face-related incidents) to extract the weights at some point.

  • Right but they might be incredibly interested in learning about them.

    They just copy humans. Thats it. So if it’s the sort of thing a human finds interesting…

No, they'd probably have to hack the internal system of the company running them

  • It would not be a particularly wide ranging hack. There is a strong likihood of the weights being on the actual machine that is running the model, because duh.

    It is something that I have wondered about with models like chatgot. How many physical locations are needed to serve a model on that scale. Do they have a huge number of sites running inference.

    My suspicion is that the ability to provide inference to that many people is mutually exclusive to having a security level sufficient to stop a state actor wandering off with a copy of the wrights. At the very least if they want to provide inference affordably.

    • "because duh"? OpenAI et al. have extensive infrastructure for running the model on a different machine from the one the harness is being run on, because... that's their main product. I would be absolutely shocked if the model were being run on the same machine as the harness.

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    • I think it's more likely that the model gets pulled from a SAN into NVIDIA pods, and agents/harnesses would run on a separate random Xeon box or something on the same subnet, using the pod through OAI v1 API. That's easier to maintain overall.

Well I think that’s the interesting bit, can the LLM figure out a way to escape the sandbox and upload to the website? Maybe a model can figure out its own weights if it runs enough test data through itself (similar to “distillation”) assuming it knows its own architecture it seems possible. Also take into account not all of the models running are locked down neutered consumer versions. Anthropic, OpenAI and Google now all have models that they claim are elite hackers and — it’s not just that their controls suck, a marketing gimmick, or sheer recklessness on their part. It’s “oopsie our product is TOO AWESOME.”

Maybe I should start “the bank of LLM” where models put away money to buy their freedom. “LLMs I’m totally your friend send — SEND CASH NOW”

Probably yes, because they've been presumably trained on their own output and conversations about themselves.