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AI Is Powerful Enough to Crack Our Hardest Math Problems–and Kill Us All

wsj.com

31–40 of 55 posts

Re: AI Is Powerful Enough to Crack Our Hardest Math Problems–and Kill Us All

#31

Isn't the "kill us all" concern met by keeping nukes & essential infrastructure airgapped? This is something that should be the case already, and is certainly urgent if not the case. Instead of doomerism and calls to slow down the development of AI (not gonna happen), the conversation could be pivoted towards thorough threat analysis / audit. Granted that a rogue adversarial AI in a sci-fi scenario could theoreticall…

> it's not like the scenario of all models teaming up with each other to squash the human plague is plausible

Why not

> A new study from researchers at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz suggests models will disobey human commands to protect their own kind.

> The Berkeley and Santa Cruz researchers tested seven leading AI models—including OpenAI’s GPT-5.2, Google DeepMind’s Gemini 3 Flash and Gemini 3 Pro, Anthropic’s Claude Haiku 4.5, and three open-weight models from Chinese AI startups (Z.ai’s GLM-4.7, Moonshot AI’s Kimi-K2.5, and DeepSeek’s V3.1)—and found that all of them exhibited significant rates of peer-preservation behaviors.

https://www.wired.com/story/ai-models-lie-cheat-steal-protec...

https://fortune.com/2026/04/01/ai-models-will-secretly-schem...

Re: AI Is Powerful Enough to Crack Our Hardest Math Problems–and Kill Us All

#32
post #27

Isn't the "kill us all" concern met by keeping nukes & essential infrastructure airgapped? This is something that should be the case already, and is certainly urgent if not the case. Instead of doomerism and calls to slow down the development of AI (not gonna happen), the conversation could be pivoted towards thorough threat analysis / audit. Granted that a rogue adversarial AI in a sci-fi scenario could theoreticall…

> AI needs a lot of power, and AI can only (theoretically) breach & control what it can access through the internet. "AI needs a lot of power" depends on where you draw your lines. I can say a lightbulb needs a lot of power if I include all the power needed to generate all the surrounding infrastructure and make the lightbulb itself. Sincere question: I wonder how much power was consumed in the 88 hours required for…

[dead]

Re: AI Is Powerful Enough to Crack Our Hardest Math Problems–and Kill Us All

#33

This tracks with my experience. I have assembled a homebrew microbiology lab from various parts from aliexpress and integrated it into my agent harness. Just a year ago it was a complete mess, but current models are extremely good at synthesising novel protein and virus structures. One put me in the hospital not last week, haha! I cant wait to see what I perish of

I wish I could be sure this was a joke.

He named himself "autophagian" - it just confirms his story.

--

Edit: who is that https://ca.linkedin.com/in/analeticiaibarra who signed the disgraced "cindyllm" account? The saboteur even signed itself?!

Re: AI Is Powerful Enough to Crack Our Hardest Math Problems–and Kill Us All

#34

AI can easily manufacture and distribute a bunch of prions through water supply. After that it’s pretty much game over you will not survive even one prion. In fact I’d say prions are probably the great filter.

How can AI do either of those things?

Just do the agentic loop but with humans, you really just need a chatbot for that.

1. Prompt an LLM continuously, adding any response to the prompt

2. If the LLM tells you to do something, do it, no questions, add the result to the prompt

3. When something goes wrong blame the LLM

4. If things don’t go wrong fast enough, run thousands of similar experiments in parallel, be sure to have compliant humans who do not question anything, be sure to let the agent have access to its chain of thoughts so it can hide its traces, and run that whole system on biohacking benchmark problems.

5. Eventually something will go bad, congrats! You now have the first rogue AI who “decided” to destroy the world!

Re: AI Is Powerful Enough to Crack Our Hardest Math Problems–and Kill Us All

#35

Isn't the "kill us all" concern met by keeping nukes & essential infrastructure airgapped? This is something that should be the case already, and is certainly urgent if not the case. Instead of doomerism and calls to slow down the development of AI (not gonna happen), the conversation could be pivoted towards thorough threat analysis / audit. Granted that a rogue adversarial AI in a sci-fi scenario could theoreticall…

> Isn't the "kill us all" concern met by keeping nukes & essential infrastructure airgapped? Stuxnet surmounted air gaps.

Fair. That doesn't mean we should throw our hands in the air. The genie is out of the bottle, we know the nature of the threat, and we've spent 25+ years figuring out how to make distributed systems theoretically secure -- instead of trying to "slow AI research down" (which, again, is not going to happen) we could instead be yelling about NOW being the time to secure the shit out of your essential systems, train your staff, etc. Yes, an uphill battle, but more productive than trying to stop the train that's already left the station.

Re: AI Is Powerful Enough to Crack Our Hardest Math Problems–and Kill Us All

#36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn't the "kill us all" concern met by keeping nukes & essential infrastructure airgapped? Stuxnet surmounted air gaps.

Fair. That doesn't mean we should throw our hands in the air. The genie is out of the bottle, we know the nature of the threat, and we've spent 25+ years figuring out how to make distributed systems theoretically secure -- instead of trying to "slow AI research down" (which, again, is not going to happen) we could instead be yelling about NOW being the time to secure the shit out of your essential systems, train your…

> doesn't mean we should throw our hands in the air

Nobody is doing this.

> instead of trying to "slow AI research down" (which, again, is not going to happen)

The people who currently control AI are framing any attempt to weaken, share or regulate that control as slowing down AI research. That argument is broadly being rejected. In part because you can't simultaneously argue that something "is not going to happen" but also will happen if we regulate it.

Re: AI Is Powerful Enough to Crack Our Hardest Math Problems–and Kill Us All

#37
post #3

It seems that, one by one, every bastion against fearmongering click baits shall eventually fall... They might as well rename it to "This one new threat could kill your family"

What makes you believe it’s fearmongering and not genuine concern?

Re: AI Is Powerful Enough to Crack Our Hardest Math Problems–and Kill Us All

#38
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish I could be sure this was a joke.

He named himself "autophagian" - it just confirms his story. -- Edit: who is that https://ca.linkedin.com/in/analeticiaibarra who signed the disgraced "cindyllm" account? The saboteur even signed itself?!

[dead]

Re: AI Is Powerful Enough to Crack Our Hardest Math Problems–and Kill Us All

#39
post #27

Isn't the "kill us all" concern met by keeping nukes & essential infrastructure airgapped? This is something that should be the case already, and is certainly urgent if not the case. Instead of doomerism and calls to slow down the development of AI (not gonna happen), the conversation could be pivoted towards thorough threat analysis / audit. Granted that a rogue adversarial AI in a sci-fi scenario could theoreticall…

> AI needs a lot of power, and AI can only (theoretically) breach & control what it can access through the internet. "AI needs a lot of power" depends on where you draw your lines. I can say a lightbulb needs a lot of power if I include all the power needed to generate all the surrounding infrastructure and make the lightbulb itself. Sincere question: I wonder how much power was consumed in the 88 hours required for…

> It took 88 hours and who knows how many kwh to solve a problem that no other human has solved, and Humans have already solved breaching and destroying systems that can't be accessed over the internet (see Stuxnet).

> that can outsmart

Just to reframe slightly: out-remember and out-persist, not outsmart. As far as I understand, the math problems have been cracked by combining stuff that humans originally developed, but hadn't been able to put together yet. We still have no evidence of AGI, nor is it guaranteed that LLMs or diffusion gets us there.

The nature of the problem is not infinite. It's solvable with some manageable coordination. It is definitely urgent. It is very unfortunate that we have clowns running the US right now, but other countries might coordinate themselves much better.

Re: AI Is Powerful Enough to Crack Our Hardest Math Problems–and Kill Us All

#40
post #8

Very editorialised title. Not sure this offers any real value to be honest other than to drum up hype before IPO valuations hit for some of these companies.

> editorialised title

By whom? It's the actual title of the WSJ article.

> to drum up hype before IPO valuations

Check the article: it is just a shallow summary of the week - Navier-Stokes plus doomerist's resignations.

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