The spooks grow ever closer, and the abyss grows ever sandier.
Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll 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 cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt 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 theyāre 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 āfeasibleā.
The thrilling conclusion of this blog post is called Signs of Life, because of course it is.
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 wonāt let this botnet thing go. Itās so desperate & ridiculous.
9B parameter models are so weak that theyāre 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. Itās 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 canāt 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 Anthropicās 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.
Iām 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 itās eating their overpriced lunch. This research is just so deeply unserious, that itās impossible to believe itās 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 š
For full transparency my original comment was a moan about how I canāt 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, theyāve 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 heās managed to foster. Heāll 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 anyoneās control destroys anyoneās 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.
mirai also was spotted ten years ago, and if iot push happened earlier so would it
ratsā best thought out attempt at immanentizing eschaton
And yet so much less plausible than ādiamondoid nanobacteriaā 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 thatās why we all are here, the problem is that they have thielās money and white house advisors
drexler is a hack and yudās nanobots canāt grow, canāt divide (theyāre made from stiff material), canāt self-repair (itās one piece), and would turn out to be extremely expensive coal dust fire, and thatās before you look too closely, so i wouldnāt say that because iot devices at least arenāt forbidden by known laws of physics
Itās funny how theyāre 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, theyāve 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
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
I too have seen the documentary āMaximum Overdriveā
deleted by creator