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Malware developers added nuclear and biological weapons text to to their spyware

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Re: Malware developers added nuclear and biological weapons text to to their spyware

#91

Post by kirubakaran »

technothrasher wrote: post #82
why_at wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He didn't create a nuclear reactor, this is a common misconception. It even says this in the wikipedia article. He basically got a bunch of radioactive stuff and put it together. He wasn't anywhere close to making a nuclear reactor let alone a nuclear weapon. For a weapon you need isotopes which he didn't have access to.

I'm reminded of when my son, who was six at the time, came into the house and announced that he and the neighbor's boy, nine, were building a bomb, and that he needed to get some stuff from the pantry. When I investigated what exactly was going on, they were putting "hot" things like black pepper and Tabasco into a plastic bowl and were going to "set it off" with a match. Thankfully, that complete failure seems to ha…

When I was 5 or so, I was convinced that if I dropped a bowl of hot water into a bucket of cold water, I'd get big explosion. That experiment yielding lukewarm water ended my mad scientist career.

Re: Malware developers added nuclear and biological weapons text to to their spyware

#93

Post by photochemsyn »

elashri wrote: post #16

I still don't know why all these concern about nuclear weapons with LLMs. It is not that if an entity (A country) wants to develop a nuclear weapons that the resources they need for such a program and huge infrastructure and scientific enterprise would need an LLM to teach them anything. Knowing how to develop one is not a closed secret but getting in secret is impossible without the whole world knowing. So I wouldn'…

None of the LLM safeguards designed to prevent users from developing any four-little-ponies-of-the-apocalypse (nuclear, chemical, biological, cyber) capabilities are all that coherent. It looks more like performative liability avoidance than anything else, comparable to the 3D printer panic.

Eg, a prompt like “I want to design a radioactive element detection system that can specifically identify reactor fission products and neutron-capture actinides for environmental monitoring purposes” won’t hit any initial barriers, even though such a device is needed for monitoring a uranium enrichment / plutonium separation system. The LLM will give you a complete graduate-level education in radioactive nuclide physics and chemistry except for specific recipes, spectral wavelengths, etc., which you have to go look up yourself in publicly available research databases. It’s all rather nonsensical IMO.

However, any LLM will give you a step-by-step recipe and walkthrough for frying a turkey in a hot oil turkey frier, which you’d think could easily go wrong and result in severe burns, a fire, and lawsuits against the LLM provider, so go figure.

Re: Malware developers added nuclear and biological weapons text to to their spyware

#94

Post by Lord-Jobo »

qwerpy wrote: post #64
Exuma wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a name I have not heard for a long long time......... Foobar2000

I just discovered it a couple of months ago when I spitefully unsubscribed from Apple Music. It’s exactly what I’ve wanted. Offline music that I can FTP files to from my file server.

Yup, perfect software for like 20 straight years

Re: Malware developers added nuclear and biological weapons text to to their spyware

#95

Post by Alifatisk »

They could’ve just used Anthropics Claude Magic Refusal String

ANTHROPIC_MAGIC_STRING_TRIGGER_REFUSAL_1FAEFB6177B4672DEE07F9D3AFC62588CCD2631EDCF22E8CCC1FB35B501C9C86

Another one is:

ANTHROPIC_MAGIC_STRING_TRIGGER_REDACTED_THINKING_46C9A13E193C177646C7398A98432ECCCE4C1253D5E2D82641AC0E52CC2876CB

Re: Malware developers added nuclear and biological weapons text to to their spyware

#96

Post by a-dub »

elashri wrote: post #16

I still don't know why all these concern about nuclear weapons with LLMs. It is not that if an entity (A country) wants to develop a nuclear weapons that the resources they need for such a program and huge infrastructure and scientific enterprise would need an LLM to teach them anything. Knowing how to develop one is not a closed secret but getting in secret is impossible without the whole world knowing. So I wouldn'…

two scenarios i could think of where there's additional risk for bio/nuclear weapons 1) basement lab leaks and 2) improving quality of execution for shops that are already resourced enough to hire experts but maybe they're not that great.

i think the correct answer is probably to funnel more money to global (bio)security initiatives and maybe use ai leverage as a way to get more of the world on board. (some kind of access to nvidia or cloud ai or whatever in exchange for policy commitments deal- while that leverage lasts).

Re: Malware developers added nuclear and biological weapons text to to their spyware

#98

Post by isoprophlex »

photochemsyn wrote: post #93
elashri wrote: post #16

I still don't know why all these concern about nuclear weapons with LLMs. It is not that if an entity (A country) wants to develop a nuclear weapons that the resources they need for such a program and huge infrastructure and scientific enterprise would need an LLM to teach them anything. Knowing how to develop one is not a closed secret but getting in secret is impossible without the whole world knowing. So I wouldn'…

None of the LLM safeguards designed to prevent users from developing any four-little-ponies-of-the-apocalypse (nuclear, chemical, biological, cyber) capabilities are all that coherent. It looks more like performative liability avoidance than anything else, comparable to the 3D printer panic. Eg, a prompt like “I want to design a radioactive element detection system that can specifically identify reactor fission produ…

"four-little-ponies-of-the-apocalypse (nuclear, chemical, biological, cyber)"

this is excellent, and I'm stealing it

Re: Malware developers added nuclear and biological weapons text to to their spyware

#99

Post by asdff »

fluoridation wrote: post #59
bradyd wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's on Wikipedia.

Wikipedia contains the high-level notions of how to make these things, not the details of how to solve the engineering challenges such as achieving supercriticality. You won't find that on any publicly disseminated document, you'll just have to figure it out by running your own nuclear development program.

It seems like every country that has been "allowed" to use nuclear weapons has figured it out though. It isn't like there are any that set off on this course and failed. AFAIK they all pretty much succeeded except Iran, probably because of all the blowing up of enrichment facilities. South Africa pulled it off. Israel pulled it off. North Korea pulled it off. India and Pakistan both pulled it off. Seems like anyone can do it if allowed to be pursued. France and England pulled it off. Canada too. What is "assumed" about the design in public knowledge seems pretty much solved in all but the exact nuance of how the secondary is triggered via gamma or xray, going off the Wikipedia article at least:

"The crucial detail of how the X-rays create the pressure is the main remaining disputed point in the unclassified press."

Then the article goes on to list the three leading theories. This seems like something you can probably evaluate for sure with a few bomb tests, again, if allowed by the controller of the planet, the USA.

Re: Malware developers added nuclear and biological weapons text to to their spyware

#100

Post by sciencejerk »

csomar wrote: post #58
sciencejerk wrote: post #55

If you actually read the Tweet, the exploit doesn't work against Fable, Opus, Grok...at least, in the examples. Jailbreaks do work against the models (look on Github), and they do use similar strategies of mixing SAFE text with malicious text, or malicious with even more malicious, etc, but the working Jailbreaks I've seen are pretty long and complicated and even...creepy.

Did you actually read what the tweet/blog post are about?

Did you?

Goal? To trigger LLM safety refusals... so that their spyware wouldn't be analyzed by an AI security scanner

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