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Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

bbc.com

111–120 of 230 posts

Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#111
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> doesn't change the fact that it's software that requires human interaction to work. Have you ever seen Claude Code launch a subagent? You've used it, right? You've seen it launch a subagent to do work? You understand that that is, in fact, Claude Code running itself, right?

A one liner shell script can run itself.

One liner shell scripts can be analyzed. Some of them can be determined to not delete the production database. The others will not be executed.

Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#112
I’d say the same thing about Palantir. It’s very clear that they are playing into the hatred and speculation about them to puff themselves up and get attention in the “any attention is good attention” era. Being a literal comic book villain syndicate is sexier than being Millennial/GenZ TRW.

(I am not saying I approve of all the stuff they are being used for or all the statements of its management.)

Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They explained in detail why they felt they had to talk about it. They think there's no safe deployment strategy other than fixing all the vulnerabilities it's likely to find, and there are too many such vulnerabilities for them to fix without getting help from a substantial number of trusted partners.

All due respect, that's the biggest crock I've ever heard in my life.

I understand where you're coming from. I can imagine myself reacting similarly if HP announced that they've invented a printer so powerful that it can print documents you don't have access to. But I don't know how to engage with this response, other than to say that Anthropic's story is plausible to me and everyone I know in either AI or security.

Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#114
post #37
post #31

My read is not so much "if we say this is dangerously powerful, it will make people want to buy our product", but rather that there is a significant segment of AI researchers for whom x-risk, AI alignment, etc. is a deal-breaker issue. And so the Sam Altmans of the world have to treat these concerns as serious to attract and retain talent. See for example OpenAI's pledge to dedicate 20% of their compute to safety res…

Yeah I just don't buy that it would somehow help AI companies for everyone to be existentially afraid of their technology. It seems much more reasonable to think that they really believe the things they're saying, than that it's some kind of 4d chess. Additionally Dario has just been really accurate with his predictions so far. For instance in early 2025 he predicted that nearly 100% of code would be written with AI…

When your statements directly influence millions of dollars in revenue, its always 4D chess. If Sam altman beleives half the stuff he's peddling, I'd be very shocked.

Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#115
post #26

I have never heard of "Heidy Khlaaf, chief AI scientist at the AI Now Institute", but the sentiment in this article is diametrically opposite that of the vulnerability research scene. There is contention among vulnerability researchers about the impact of Mythos! But it's not "are frontier models going to shake up vulnerability research and let loose a deluge of critical vulnerabilities" --- software security people…

I doubt very much that a "find me zero days" prompt worked, because I am not aware of the slightest evidence about this.

The Anthropic report that describes the bugs they have found with Mythos in various open-source projects admits that a prompt like "find me zero days" does not work with Mythos.

To find bugs, they have run Mythos a large number of times on each file of the scanned project, with different prompts.

They have started with a more generic prompt intended to discover whether there are chances to find bugs in that file, in order to decide whether it is worthwhile to run Mythos many times on that file. Then they have used more and more specific prompts, to identify various classes of bugs. Eventually, when it was reasonably certain that a bug exists, Mythos was run one more time, with a prompt requesting the confirmation that the identified bug exists (and the creation of an exploit or patch).

Because what you say about Carlini is in obvious contradiction with the technical report about Mythos of Anthropic, I assume that is was just pure BS or some demo run on a fake program with artificial bugs. Or else the so-called prompt was not an LLM prompt, but just the name of a command for a bug-finding harness, which runs the LLM in a loop, with various suitable prompts, as described by Anthropic.

Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#116
post #35

I think the big secret is that AI is just software. In the same way that a financial firm doesn't all of sudden make a bunch of money because Microsoft shipped an update to Excel, AI is inert without intention. If there's any major successes in AI output it's because a person got it to do that. Claude Code is great, but it will also wipe out a database even though it's instructed not to (I can confirm from experience…

Yes, and it has been said since day one of LLMs that all we need to do is keep things that way - no action without human intervention. Just like it was said that you should never grant AI direct access to change your production systems. But the stories of people who have done exactly that and had their systems damaged and deleted show that people aren't trying to even keep such basic safety nets in place. AI is getti…

If you had made a tool that gave gpt-3 the ability to run arbitrary commands on your production systems you could have seen things go badly.

Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#117
post #59
post #35

I think the big secret is that AI is just software. In the same way that a financial firm doesn't all of sudden make a bunch of money because Microsoft shipped an update to Excel, AI is inert without intention. If there's any major successes in AI output it's because a person got it to do that. Claude Code is great, but it will also wipe out a database even though it's instructed not to (I can confirm from experience…

> doesn't change the fact that it's software that requires human interaction to work. Have you ever seen Claude Code launch a subagent? You've used it, right? You've seen it launch a subagent to do work? You understand that that is, in fact, Claude Code running itself, right?

You're using it and if someone else was using it the output would be different. The point is really that simple.

Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLM models are a distribution. Unlike a python script or turning machine, a LLM model is capable of generating any series of tokens. Developers need stop reasoning about LLM agents as deterministic and to start to think about agents in terms of Monte Carlo and Las Vegas algorithms. It isn't enough to have an agents, it also requires a cheap verifier. If I was a Ph.D. student today, I'd probably do a thesis on cheap v…

If you told a programmer 30 years ago that someday we'd switch from a deterministic to nondeterministic paradigm for programming computers, they'd ask if we'd put lead back in the drinking water.

Been doing this 30 years now. I am asking that question. Everyone talks around it.

Re: Why AI companies want you to be afraid of them

#120

This is my own take, directly related to this that I posted a little while back. The one thing that I think the article missed is the geopolitical angle they’re also working: * We need to completely deregulate these US companies so China doesn't win and take us over * We need to heavily regulate anybody who is not following the rules that make us the de-facto winner * This is so powerful it will take all the jobs (an…

The outcome of this is, in my opinion, the United States Government classifying and regulating LLMs as something akin to how the ATF classifies weapons, ie. requiring a license to operate an LLM (hosting), with different classifications and determinations on the relative "power" of a particular model and framework, and outright banning most open-source models, like how DIY machine guns or suppressors are banned.

Think of a standard for classifying and regulating the self-hosting of open-source models similar to how an FFL works. You can do it, but you must have all your paperwork lined up, with background checks, a valid business license, and if you forget to dot an "i" or cross a "t" the Cyber version of the ATF shows up and shoots your fucking dog.

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