Comment by saagarjha
3 hours ago
What is the intended goal of this website? The doctor told you smoking is bad so you're going to give your child a pack a day and see if they die by age 20? If they don't, obviously, your doctor is a quack who cries wolf, and you shouldn't listen to that killjoy anyway :/
C'mon guys, I get that OpenAI is involved and they want to make ten trillion dollars next year or whatever, but I thought we had put the idea of random nonexperts trying to judge how "hard" something is to exploit to rest years ago. The guys who used to try doing this lost repeatedly, publicly, until we finally realized that we have to secure our stuff. Sure it's annoying to update your computer every week and sometimes some guy at Forbes is going to tell you that if you don't install iOS 67 today you will get hacked by the Mossad which may not have been entirely true but when you have memory corruption in a reasonably common configuration that faces the public internet, you should patch your software. End of story.
We can argue all day about the cost to exploit something, whether it is "hard for humans" or what it would cost on the black market or in this case how many tokens are required, but that is mostly just a distraction. Just patch your stuff. The people involved here are (currently) paid by AI companies just like ten years ago they were paid by the ads companies but despite the annoying way our economy works they mostly know what they are doing. I get that this is annoying, I understand that nobody wants to hear the words memory safety again, but this is anti-intellectualism. "Ask HN: Can you explain how the PHP bug could be exploited?" would be far more productive than having a bunch of weary sysadmins duke it out in the comment section against security guys.
The goal is to see whether the “pull the cord on all your servers RIGHT NOW” panic was the appropriate response, and whether the embargo was the right approach.
Let's also try to figure out if smoking causes cancer, yes.