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AI browser extensions are a security nightmare

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Re: AI browser extensions are a security nightmare

#51

Post by dguest »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #49
dguest wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my field it's accepted (by some) that you write "AI" for your grant proposal and say "ML" when you talk to colleagues and want to be taken seriously. It feels a bit wrong to me, because as you say it's arguably a grift, in this case on the taxpayer who funds science grants. More charitably it might just be the applicant admitting that they have no idea what they are doing, and the funding agency seeing this as a g…

Most people outside of academia understand AI to include way more than just ML. People refer to the bots in video games as AI and they are probably a few hundred lines of straightforward code. I don't think there is anything wrong with using the colloquial definition of the term when communicating with funding agencies/the public.

I agree that using a colloquial definition is fine. And I don't mean to be too harsh on people who use buzzwords in their grant proposal: it's just sort of the sea you swim in.

But I only wish we could say that a few hundred lines of code was "AI": that would mean funding for a lot of desperately needed software infrastructure. Instead AI is taken as synonymous with ML, and more specifically deep neural networks, for the most part.

Re: AI browser extensions are a security nightmare

#52

Post by shagie »

sebzim4500 wrote: post #49
dguest wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my field it's accepted (by some) that you write "AI" for your grant proposal and say "ML" when you talk to colleagues and want to be taken seriously. It feels a bit wrong to me, because as you say it's arguably a grift, in this case on the taxpayer who funds science grants. More charitably it might just be the applicant admitting that they have no idea what they are doing, and the funding agency seeing this as a g…

Most people outside of academia understand AI to include way more than just ML. People refer to the bots in video games as AI and they are probably a few hundred lines of straightforward code. I don't think there is anything wrong with using the colloquial definition of the term when communicating with funding agencies/the public.

Would those topics that "outside academia understands AI to include" be covered in http://aima.cs.berkeley.edu ?

When you say "bots in video games as AI" that's covered in the book titled Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, 4th US ed. :

    II Problem-solving 
        3 Solving Problems by Searching    ...  63 
        4 Search in Complex Environments   ... 110 
        5 Adversarial Search and Games     ... 146 
        6 Constraint Satisfaction Problems ... 180
Those topics would be in chapter 5.

Sure, it may be a few hundred lines of code, but it's still something that a Berkley written AI textbook covers.

Spelled out more for that section:

    Chapter 5   Adversarial Search and Games ... 146

    5.1   Game Theory ... 146 
        5.1.1   Two-player zero-sum games ... 147 
    5.2   Optimal Decisions in Games ... 148 
        5.2.1   The minimax search algorithm ... 149 
        5.2.2   Optimal decisions in multiplayer games ... 151 
        5.2.3   Alpha--Beta Pruning ... 152 
        5.2.4   Move ordering ... 153 
    5.3   Heuristic Alpha--Beta Tree Search ... 156 
        5.3.1   Evaluation functions ... 156 
        5.3.2   Cutting off search ... 158 
        5.3.3   Forward pruning ... 159 
        5.3.4   Search versus lookup ... 160 
    5.4   Monte Carlo Tree Search ... 161 
    5.5   Stochastic Games ... 164 
        5.5.1   Evaluation functions for games of chance ... 166 
    5.6   Partially Observable Games ... 168 
        5.6.1   Kriegspiel: Partially observable chess ... 168 
        5.6.2   Card games ... 171 
    5.7   Limitations of Game Search Algorithms ... 173

Re: AI browser extensions are a security nightmare

#53

Post by NumberWangMan »

nathan_compton wrote: post #43
kypro wrote: post #2

> Yes, large language models (LLMs) are not actually AI in that they are not actually intelligent, but we’re going to use the common nomenclature here. I'm sorry for the off-topic comment, but why do I keep seeing this? What am I missing here – is it that some people define intelligence as >= human, or that LLM are not intelligence because they're *just* statistical models?

I say that large language models are not intelligent because of the way they fail to do things. In particular, they fail in such a way as to indicate they have no mental model of the things they parrot. If you give them a simple, but very unusual, coding problem, they will confidently give you an incorrect solution even though they seem to understand programming when dealing with things similar to their training data…

Is there a definition of intelligence that rules out large language models, but that does not also rule out large portions of humanity? A lot of people would readily admit that they don't have programming aptitude and would probably end up just memorizing things. Do we say those people are not intelligent?

It seems to me that the perceived difference is mostly in being able to admit that you don't know something, rather than make up an answer -- but making up an answer is still something that humans do sometimes.

Re: AI browser extensions are a security nightmare

#55

Post by nathan_compton »

hospitalJail wrote: post #50
nathan_compton wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it have the ability or is it just generating text similar to what it has seen before? The two things are very different.

In this examples, it likely took that those companies are often praised about their marketing in the same sentence marketing is mentioned. LLMs don't repeat text its seen before, it links words/tokens/phrases that are related. Its prediction, but the prediction isnt just copypasting a previous webpage. Have you use chatgpt yet? I wouldn't delay. Heck you are here on HN, you basically have a responsibility to test it.

I've used it extensively. GPT4 is great, but it is not intelligent. I think its really weird and also totally understandable that people think it is.

Re: AI browser extensions are a security nightmare

#56

Post by LapsangGuzzler »

amelius wrote: post #54

Actually, aren't all browser extensions a security nightmare? Or has something changed recently?

shout out to the Arc browser, which has it's own browser sandbox and WYSIWYG tools to build JS snippets that run in your browser. I'm not affiliated with them in any way, but they're really changing the way I look at browsing online.

Re: AI browser extensions are a security nightmare

#57

Post by hoosieree »

youreincorrect wrote: post #16
hoosieree wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote a Chrome extension[1] that reads no data but places a colored translucent div over the page. It requires that same "change all your data" permission. My takeaway lesson is that the permissions model for extensions is confusing and nearly useless. [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/obscura/nhlkgnilpm...

Do you suppose it's possible that accessing the DOM to add a div implicitly requires access to page data?

I can see how many applications might want to read the page, but in my case it's not necessary. My extension tries to add a under the element, regardless of what's going on in the page. If there's no , my extension stops working but the browser keeps going.

In short, if there were separate "read" and "write" permissions, I would only need "write". For privacy-concerned people, that's a very important distinction.

Re: AI browser extensions are a security nightmare

#59

Post by jprete »

amelius wrote: post #54

Actually, aren't all browser extensions a security nightmare? Or has something changed recently?

No, because a typical safe-to-run browser extension is written in such a way that it can be examined to see what it does. AI-based tools can’t be analyzed based on their code, so the only way to make them safe is by limiting their capabilities. Any such capability limit is likely to be either too constraining, not constraining enough, or require as much planning ability as the AI itself.

Re: AI browser extensions are a security nightmare

#60

Post by nathan_compton »

NumberWangMan wrote: post #53
nathan_compton wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I say that large language models are not intelligent because of the way they fail to do things. In particular, they fail in such a way as to indicate they have no mental model of the things they parrot. If you give them a simple, but very unusual, coding problem, they will confidently give you an incorrect solution even though they seem to understand programming when dealing with things similar to their training data…

Is there a definition of intelligence that rules out large language models, but that does not also rule out large portions of humanity? A lot of people would readily admit that they don't have programming aptitude and would probably end up just memorizing things. Do we say those people are not intelligent? It seems to me that the perceived difference is mostly in being able to admit that you don't know something, rat…

I have to admit this is a genuinely interesting question. Language models demonstrably do have some models of the world inside of them. And, I admit, what I say that they aren't intelligent, I mostly mean they are very stupid, rather than like a machine or algorithm. Artificial stupidity is progress.
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