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NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

nytimes.com

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Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#151

Post by aspenmartin »

watwut wrote: post #119
gallerdude wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So let’s say you’re in Anthropic’s shoes. You see that LLM’s are getting better and better, and it’s very possible that they will have some impact on jobs in the next few years, and a very meaningful impact on cybersecurity. Is it more ethical to stay silent about these concerns, as you might have a bit of self interest? Or even if it looks a bit self interested, is it better to warn people ahead of time? I think the…

I think that Anthropic is fully absolutely unethical. And they lied a lot. They were actively trying to make the doom happen while trying to cash out maximally on doom trolling. If they were actually concerned over social impact, they would try to minimize it. They could have sell their product as a tool to be used to make economy boom, they tried to sell it on promiss to make it shrink for most people. It really doe…

> They were actively trying to make the doom happen while trying to cash out maximally on doom trolling.

These words make no sense. Anthropic delayed mythos/fable rollout. A mythos model without safeguards would have been a pretty bad idea, and they sacrificed a ton of revenue and risked being scooped by any of the other labs in the meantime. Frontier models are only frontier temporarily until the next lab releases their model. Of course they are a company and need to act in their own best interest.

It is also clearly serious the problems we need to think about as we march quickly towards even more capable systems. Why on earth is it a problem to point this out?

> If they were actually concerned over social impact, they would try to minimize it. They could have sell their product as a tool to be used to make economy boom, they tried to sell it on promiss to make it shrink for most people.

What a really weird take; they employ some of the best safety and alignment teams in the industry and this is an active area of research that they are campaigning for more attention on. You complain about them “doom trolling” and then complain they don’t do anything about…the doom? No sense at all.

It is perfectly consistent to (1) sound an alarm and (2) March full steam ahead as quickly as they can. If they don’t do (1) that’s unethical. If they don’t do (2) someone else will. I would rather someone like Dario align these models than the CCC. Plus it would be nice not to have a war over Taiwan which is inevitable if China gains enough of the upper hand in this AI race.

Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#152

Post by aspenmartin »

colechristensen wrote: post #108
medlazik wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said absolutely nothing about LLMs, which is a fantastic tool I'm using every day. I'm talking about marketing.

The point I'm trying to make is Anthropic's marketing about broad security risk related to the capability of its models is a valid concern though their dog and pony show really overdid it, probably to the detriment of us all for many reasons. It is indeed amplifying the abilities of people to find and exploit security issues. The point of my anecdote is I was able to identify and fix an at least security adjacent bug…

What was the dog and pony show?

Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#153

Post by aspenmartin »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #117
scottyah wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why on earth would you expect any of them to take profit so early in the game?

Silly me, expecting a company worth a trillion dollars to make... some money. Any money. A single profitable product.

Well the good thing is you’ve done the homework to definitively demonstrate that this is remotely true. These confident claims of this all being some sort of unprofitable Ponzi scheme, not understanding the concept of a growth phase which a multitude of highly successful tech companies have already demonstrated work while simultaneously commenting on a site with YCombinator in the url are just getting amusing now.

Of course this is a profitable technology, and it doesn’t matter if any of the labs are profitable today or not. Running at a loss is a perfectly rational strategy.

Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#154

Post by distill17801 »

convolvatron wrote: post #87
segmondy wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question, do you realize that the NSA are mere mortals? Do you realize how much it takes to train a model? Does the NSA make their own chips or planes? The NSA buys a lot of technology because they can't make their own.

NSA has had their own supercomputing program for decades. they design and produce their own large scale machines. chips, fabrics, arithmetic units, all of it. they also employ quite a number of hardcore mathematicians, computer scientists, and systems wranglers. if they decided it was of strategic importance there is absolutely no reason they couldn't train their own models.

I guess we're just conspiracy theorists for landing at the objective conclusion that three letter government agencies:

- find "modern AI" to have strategic importance

- have ways to spend loads of money while having a front-facing budget on the record

- could be running a PR program to have Americans think they "buy" access to models like they do, but the AI companies were taken over by these agencies long ago

Look at Google, Microsoft...Apple got away with it by having as much on-device operation as possible so they could wash their hands, honestly saying "We don't have it."

This is the world's largest data gathering operation. Remember after 9/11 when the NSA copied as much Internet back bone traffic as they could?

I'm not for or against, even as a resident, but we certainly shouldn't be naive.

Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#155

Post by LPisGood »

xeubie wrote: post #100
dofm wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: do you think the NSA aren't training their own LLMs? (With or without Anthropic and OpenAI's help) It's a perfect technology for their uses, they get a big chunk of a $100 billion black budget, and they've had access to the research for at least as long as we have.

I can't say what they're doing now because I worked for the NSA 15 years ago but the view of them as an omnipotent power is a product of Hollywood. The government is good at throwing an ungodly amount of resources at something to get a result through sheer attrition, and so they are often the source of original development of technologies. The private sector has always been much better at building a technology to gre…

I’ve heard of “blue suiters” for air force brass, but never blue badgers.

Anyways, isn’t NSA one of the largest employers of mathematicians in the world? Surely they’re doing something useful.

Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#156

Post by aleqs »

kelnos wrote: post #137
aleqs wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it's feasible, you just intercept the traffic post-decryption on the cloud/server side. You don't control how/where your traffic to 3p cloud services is decrypted.

You keep saying this, but it's nonsensical. If I terminate TLS on the box that does processing, there's nothing to intercept. And these days (especially post-Snowden), many (most?) companies encrypt data when sending between servers within their own (private network) infrastructure.

You have no control about where TLS is terminated when you're talking to a 3p cloud service (with services you don't control/run like cloud LLM APIs). You also have no control about what spyware is installed on/around VMs you rent (and there's a lot). Also when talking about encryption between servers within datacenters you seem to be missing that in order for such multi -stage/path encryption (separate certs/keys) to be possible the data first has to be decrypted at each point, not to mention every major US tech company generally cooperates with the NSA and gives them access to anything they request (including allowing the installation of dedicated hardware to intercept decrypted traffic as has been publicly exposed documented many times already).

Yours and others' claims that it's impossible and nonsensical is based on lack of understanding.

Yours and others' claims that things somehow got better after Snowden is just a completely baseless statement - if you actually looked into what happened post-Snowden - absolutely nothing was done to prevent NSA spying on any communications they want, in fact it got significantly worse.

Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#157

Post by torstenvl »

JackFr wrote: post #110
AustinDev wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they wanted to officially take the weights the DPA would work and Dario could do nothing. If they wanted to do it in clandestine manner no one could stop them and no one would know. It's very likely they already have all the weights from all the frontier models. I mean all the frontier models are capable of being served from AWS Bedrock so the weights aren't exactly locked in some air-gapped vault. It would be eas…

Pretty sure even under DPA, taking without fair compensation would be a violation of the takings clause of 5th Amendment and wouldn't withstand legal scrutiny. If they wanted to get them clandestinely, yeah, they'd likely get away with it, but it is stealing.

To be a taking, it would have to be property. Weights are almost certainly not property.

Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#158

Post by [deleted] »

baq wrote: post #121
teravor wrote: post #112

mythos allowed mediocre people to get results by holding their hand through the process, or just ignoring their irrelevant input and knowing what to do. if you throw millions of tokens at IDA Pro MCP with the right prompt lets just say security by obscurity fails miserably because there is no obscurity when the LLM chews through the decompilation.

It isn’t bad, it isn’t good. It’s just how the world looks now. All software is open source now, some of it is just more open, some of it is less.

[deleted]

Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#159

Post by john_strinlai »

kelnos wrote: post #141
john_strinlai wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how many of them took them up on the offer, and how many are in leadership roles? this is not really relevant to the point, but to satisfy your curiosity: more than one, and one. > it takes a very narrow range of personality to want to be a cop the nsa's brightest aren't doing "cop" things. certainly none of the people i know of working there are "cop-minded" in any sense. they are doing cool research and applicati…

> this is not really relevant to the point, but to satisfy your curiosity: more than one, and one. What? That's not only relevant to the point, it's incredibly relevant. If the NSA is only able to recruit 2% of the math PhDs they approach, then that's important information. "More than one" is not particularly useful; you seem to be dodging the question because it undermines your argument.

>"More than one" is not particularly useful;

telling you exactly how many people i know in the NSA is also not particularly useful. i'm one guy. there is no statistically significant information from my answer.

>you seem to be dodging the question because it undermines your argument.

my "argument" is that there are plenty of smart people in the NSA. that's it. i am confused why that is seemingly so offensive to you that you had to reply twice.

Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#160

Post by john_strinlai »

kelnos wrote: post #140
john_strinlai wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they're cops with too much access, it doesn't take a genius to outsmart a cop the nsa has an unlimited budget and spend a good portion of that budget recruiting some of the smartest people in the country. while they dont have super powers, they also arent the town cop who took a 6 month course after high school then joined the force. it does no good to hold them up as mythical figures. it also does no good to prete…

> the nsa has an unlimited budget No they don't, and if you're going to try to argue something with that as your opener, it very easily casts large amounts of skepticism on whatever you are about to say. Perhaps you're exaggerating for effect, but that also undermines your point.

>No they don't, and if you're going to try to argue something with that as your opener, it very easily casts large amounts of skepticism on whatever you are about to say.

if you read my comment like we're having a normal conversation instead of a thesis defense, you'll get my point just fine.

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