Comment by scottyah

> "We could crush the competition but we are holding back” is a laughable excuse that I’m sure you wouldn’t buy in other contexts.

I don't think you understand. Benchmarks show just that, that they "are crushing the competition".

I mean, remember Fable? A couple of months back it was lauded as leaps and bounds above everything, that needed to be contained at all costs? Well, apparently Kimi K3.1 Pro outperforms it.

What industrial level of cope do you need to drag in order to look at the results and claim they need to make excuses about anything at all?

I'm not sure I follow. Let's say that GLM remains the frontier of open source cyber capabilities because Kimi is nerfed. Your situation, and the situation of your attackers, remain exactly the same. You run GLM to audit your code, they do the same looking for exploits.

Let us say that un-nerfed Kimi was released, and it turns out to be at the absolute frontier of cyber capabilities, Mythos 5.5 level, a step ahead of anything else. What now? Well now your situation is exactly the same as before, just that auditing and hacking got more expensive. You run a Kimi security audit, they do the same to try to pwn you. However, now the cabal of Linux kernel defenders with secret access to Mythos 5.5 all of a sudden have no advantage, where before they used to have one. And even worse now they are in a literal race to be the first ones to find every bug that Kimi is capable of finding, and patching it yesterday.

So for you, this makes no difference in practice, your capabilities are not elevated, and neither are those of the attackers. The only result of the other scenario is an overall defender disadvantage.

This is not about guardrails, it's just not post-training the model on tasks that specifically relate to cyber-offense. It's a very lightweight intervention, and it makes the model less of a target for bad actors.

claude code "auto-mode" uses a smaller sonnet-like model for classifying, which means it's basically dumb, and the harness biases it into denials

Well, and I am genuinely curious here, wouldn't defender and attacker capabilities being accessible equally by both parties be objectively worse than having a limited amount of privileged defenders? Of course, you could have every piece of code go through an adversarial audit before it's pushed, but in an equal world you would have to always devote as much or more resources to this as your attackers. And historically speaking people just don't do this in practice.

In the scenario where only "verified" defenders get access to the best cyber capabilities, unverified plebian defenders and blackhats are on the same level exactly as described above, there's just also a few defenders that get to run things on godmode.

So to me, it seems that the only result of frontier cyber capabilities is removing a defender advantage. Although that advantage is not for everyone, it can only exists as long as capabilities are unequally distributed. Am I missing something?

I wrote a few lengthier comments on some other similar replies. Summarized my argument is that it seems to me to be strictly better that select defenders have an advantage, rather than everyone being equalized. If you're not one of the privileged few that might be frustrating, but open source models upgrade the attack and defense by the same amount, so open source cyber capabilities being at the frontier only results in a defender disadvantage.

Replying here also as I'm curious about the counterargument.

Noted. I also did it intentionally to sound a bit spicy, which seemed like a good idea at the time. So I am guilty, and I regret my actions.

"Cybersecurity" as a general term often includes offensive "cyber" which is what is being talked about here.