The spooks grow ever closer, and the abyss grows ever sandier.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Anthropic has a new angle for trying to get local LLMs banned, apparently they’re about to be able to use your temu android tv to take over your smart toaster:
edit: The TVs need to be off-brand to lack basic security features, and also there must be at least four of them to even start being inference-capable, and the actual setting up of a distributed inference network on android tvs is handwaved as “feasible”.
The thrilling conclusion of this blog post is called Signs of Life, because of course it is.
I too have seen the documentary “Maximum Overdrive”
I wonder what answers you would get if you polled these Anthropic people about the Covid lab leak theory
Self-replicating prompt-injection text is a much more interesting and much more immanent threat to cause AI systems to misbehave in a propagating way
It’s funny how they’re twisting themselves into pretzels to make this work. They started by casually saying that AI could copy itself onto the internet, not anticipating that people would immediately point out just how much hardware it takes to run their AI. Seems like they really want to die on this hill.
What fullsquare said, they’ve got years of sci-fi filtered through lesswrong short stories and sequence posts saying it could happen, so they repeated that despite all the ways it is completely impossible given the limitations and hardware requirements of LLMs.
but it has to work, it was foretold in ai in a box prophecy
MalwareTech/Marcus Hutchins has an excellent take on this that he posted for the normies on linkedin
Posted verbatim below to save you from having to read LinkedIn
Anthropic really won’t let this botnet thing go. It’s so desperate & ridiculous.
9B parameter models are so weak that they’re essentially useless. There is no reason at all for anyone or anything to be self-replicating them.
Even if you quantize a 9B parameter model down to the smallest possible size (at which point it becomes less than useless), and you run it on regular RAM instead of VRAM (at which point it also becomes painfully slow) it still requires about 5 GB of RAM, which is way more than most IoT device has.
Mirai is already self-propagating across millions of IoT devices without the help of any AI. It’s simply not needed, and it adds unnecessary complexity.
Many IoT devices are ephemeral and their entire OS is reset on reboot, so any code running on the device is gone after reboot. The AI models would also be competing with malware like Mirai, which propagates exponentially faster, and locks down the devices so other malware can’t get in.
Again, why? What is the purpose of this. Anthropic keeps pushing this ridiculous idea but have yet to establish any reason for why this would actually happen, or who would benefit from it.
Any remotely intelligent threat actor would just use a powerful unquantized models to reverse engineer & find vulnerabilities in obscure devices and write normal (AI-free) self-propagating code. Ironically, they typically do this by stealing Anthropic API keys and using Anthropic’s models, not open-weight ones.
Again, why are we self-propagating open-weight models? There is absolutely no reason to do that. The combined processing power of every IoT device on earth would be less than a moderately sized stolen cloud compute GPU instance.
I’m pretty sure Anthropic keeps pushing these ridiculous narratives in an attempt to paint open models as dangerous, thus making the case for banning them. They have been OBSESSED with GLM lately, likely because it’s eating their overpriced lunch. This research is just so deeply unserious, that it’s impossible to believe it’s being done in good faith.
What if an AI did the same thing that Mirai is already doing only we spent far more money on the attempt and we were almost certainly legally liable for the consequences?
edit: failed to spot the ninja edit so the response made no sense
Sorry I thought this updated comment was a better one 😅
For full transparency my original comment was a moan about how I can’t decide whether Dario and co are confidence scammers or genuinely earnestly think that these next word prediction models are sentient due to all the brain damage, they’ve inflicted on themselves. FWIW Sama and friends are almost certainly in that first camp.
Sama is a serial scammer, this is just the biggest scam he’s managed to foster. He’ll say whatever it takes to get the payout.
Dario is a true believer but I also think the prospect of $billions skews his judgement
The presence of billions of dollars under anyone’s control destroys anyone’s brains as their lives have all negative feedback removed, their surroundings become a reflection of their own preferences alone rather than bearing any information about the world, and their social connections become transactional and sycophantic.
rats’ best thought out attempt at immanentizing eschaton
And yet so much less plausible than “diamondoid nanobacteria” or whatever it is. I think the problem is that you can recognize all the words without having read the same obscure sci-fi stories as Yud.
i mean that’s why we all are here, the problem is that they have thiel’s money and white house advisors
drexler is a hack and yud’s nanobots can’t grow, can’t divide (they’re made from stiff material), can’t self-repair (it’s one piece), and would turn out to be extremely expensive coal dust fire, and that’s before you look too closely, so i wouldn’t say that because iot devices at least aren’t forbidden by known laws of physics
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