Comment by lenerdenator
7 days ago
First, the Chinese people aren't spooky. That's not what I'm getting at. I think you know that, too.
Second, you can run it offline, but you aren't going to run the machine completely offline. You're going to have it on the internet. LLMs are probabilistic, not deterministic, programs. Evaluating them for what sort of security vulnerabilities they present - no matter what country made them - is still a fairly young field of information security, and isn't going to be as easy as evaluating a deterministic program.
Do I know for sure that there's some combination of states within a DeepSeek LLM that opens up an internet connection and sends information back to external servers? No. Do I know for sure that there's no combination of states within a DeepSeek LLM that opens up an internet connection and sends information back to external servers? Also no.
What I do know is that the People's Republic of China has an extensive history of offensive cyber operations against American and other Western computer networks. I also know that these efforts are likely ongoing.
Know who I don't have the same concerns about? Mistral.
I'm not sure if you've ever heard of firewalls before but you can in fact prevent network access you don't sanction.
Given that agentic AIs have shown an ability to exploit known vulnerabilities in software, it probably wouldn't be too far of a stretch to think they could get around firewalls in one way or another.
Which takes us back to the "it's hard to properly secure non-deterministic software" point.
No, it's definitely easy enough to build a container that doesn't let LLMs out. The problem is that these AI companies are building a playpen made of wet noodles and expecting AI to stay out of trouble
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do you think the French security state and tech industry are not competent enough to put in a backdoor ?
I think they have significantly less desire to than the PRC.
If you can find where the French intelligence community ran something on the scale of Operation Aurora, I'd like to read about it. Seriously.
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