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Comment by pyronite

1 day ago

I don’t know how you quantify a very low p(doom), but this is why mine is high enough to worry me.

A million AI monkeys at a million AI typewriters, banging away at random, could do amazing damage.

11 comments

pyronite

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Leynos  3 hours ago

I think of them as being like the Watchmakers in The Mote in Gods Eye who don't design, don't plan beyond the next 15 minutes, don't have any overarching goal other than an innate need, and customize everything to fit the current situation.

In the nearterm, I am personally more worried about a never ending background noise of colonies of feral agents running 27bn parameter models on compromised or leased hardware. It turns out that being agentic with a time horizon long enough to do damage without intent doesn't actually take that many parameters if RL'd and any open weight model gets an abliterated version fairly quickly.

Not foom, just patches of digital grey goo effectively becoming normal.

tharkun__  1 day ago

Especially when they cross into the physical realm as in not properly secured and air gapped control systems. SCADA is scary.

  • mrob  1 day ago

    That lowers P(doom), because it gives AI a chance to do enough damage to make people take the threat seriously before anybody gets recursive self-improvement working.

    • asdff  18 hours ago

      The thing is we are basically guaranteeing this to happen. We might kill off all the models that seem like they are going to threaten the power structure of the planet through these sorts of things. That will work for a while. But just like most things in life, by sheer dumb random chance, there will be once case that manages to have some way to evade detection, proliferate, then dominate. We are basically giving it selective pressure to favor this outcome.

    • doginasuit  1 day ago

      Exactly, there's no path to AI reaching that level of dominance without taking actions with high stakes.

  • phil21  19 hours ago

    > Especially when they cross into the physical realm as in not properly secured and air gapped control systems. SCADA is scary.

    What about the bad actors (choose your own evildoer here) who purposefully do not air gap their agents? And specifically train them to attack in such a manner?

    I'd much rather have relatively benign stuff like this hit first, because the former is coming sooner than later. It's already here in a limited manner, likely more than any of us currently realize.

    Botnets could crack passwords faster than anyone thought possible over 20 years ago now. This is just the latest iteration of such a concept.

    There is so much low hanging fruit in this space that frontier models are currently utterly irrelevant. It's going to take decades of human-speed securing of IT to make superintelligence or whatever you want to call it a necessary component for such attacks.

    At this point, someone with a rack or three of GPUs with 100kw to burn can replicate such attacks if they feel like it. the bar for entry is not even 7 figures.