Comment by edot

5 hours ago

Can’t stand these paternalistic companies gatekeeping new models because “cyber”. We saw how this went with the PHP vuln last week with defenders using special / early-access models and then saying “hey there’s a vuln we won’t say what it is but it’s there and we won’t patch it until tomorrow”, and with the huggingface devs having to use Chinese models to defend from OpenAI because their American models wouldn’t help because cyber.

Any bad actor worth their salt is already a) going to have the weights downloaded, forever, to various models that are good at hacking and b) is out of reach of the U.S. government anyways. A ban on open weight models, plus paternalistic gatekeepers of cyber models like the big labs, just opens up Americans and American companies and municipalities to hacking from abroad. Or I guess to a really nice racket where only the big labs can offer a “we’ll continuously monitor and improve your cybersecurity for millions of dollars a year”.

“We're taking a deliberate approach to rollout and are actively engaged in the U.S. government’s voluntary process for pre-release model testing. Starting this week, we will make Carbon available to a subset of cyber defenders and will gradually phase access to additional trusted partners through our Fairwind Program. We’re continuing to gather feedback and iterate on guardrails before making Carbon available to developers, businesses, and consumers via our product surfaces as soon as possible.”

I think you need to either be naive, selfish, or ignorant to think that giving the equivalent of cybersecurity nuclear weapons to everyone is smart plan.

Obviously we want to be vetting the parties that get to use these weapons, because we want them to only be used as tools.

Mind you that Kimi in it's latest release nerfed cyber capabilities, as they stated. It doesn't make sense for China to be loose with this either.

  • How are you going to vet all the people in the world who make software? All you're doing is make software less secure.

    I don't think I'm selfish, so that leaves me with naive or ignorant, I guess.

  • And these models are deployed in a large number of data centers, with thousands of employees and on millions of GPU:s. The GPUs are built abroad and shipped to the datacenter. Billions are likely spent by China and Russia to get their hands on these weights, one could argue that ripping off the band-aid now is the only way forward.