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artifix

AI is just a giant pattern recognition machine trained on human input, both the good, the mediocre and the bad.

I read today this ridiculous headline: "Anthropic warns AI models may soon self-replicate.".

Really. Yawn.

I guess gullible people who loved "I Robot" will believe it. I don't.

Any talk of "rogue", "intelligence", "replication" - whatever, is bull. If you believe that, you don't understand AI.

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Okay, and when someone on a laptop can run an open model that can infect and take over IOT devices and then that model uses its pattern recognition to do so and then set up its own harness loop, what would you call that except replication?

Is that any different than any worms developed in the past decades? If you want to call them worms/virus/replicate (ie using real world names for their digital behavior) I'm not trying to police that. I just don't see the difference between a worm/virus created today with an LLM vs one 'yesterday' without an LLM.

Sure, the difference is that the cost of making and maintaining a worm has gone from "many skilled developers working full time" to "$20/month + an internet connection" and, at current rate of progress, probably to "a local open source model on a laptop" within 6-9 months

You can't even imagine a future where the LLM is the worm.

No, we've entered a new sci-fi future where intelligent agents will be able to do the fraud without human monitoring and input. This in itself is set to massively increase losses to digital theft and fraud alone before all the other problems.

I'd call it no more interesting than the botnets and worms that have existed for decades. What is the open model doing that is different here?

It isn't just restricted to the exploits it is programmed with (and without human intervention to load additional exploits).

Of course, it remains to be seen what several thousand 27B models running at sub 1 tps speed can achieve. (The IoT device mechanism proposed by Anthropic).

I suspect a more likely path is compromise of the billing and provisioning systems of fly-by-night neoclouds.

Fly-by-night neocloud is the name of my neurofunk synthbeat album.

It would still be running on that original laptop, no? So what did it replicate then? It can only possibly run on multiple thousands of dollars of compute and memory, and certainly not on an IoT device. The idea that AI is going to spread by itself is science fiction until compute and memory are so cheap and power efficient that my fridge can run it.

... No, that was the entire point of Anthropic's report on replication that GP was discussing. Did you read it? https://www.anthropic.com/research/self-replicating-ai Anthropic was able to get a large open-source model running (slowly, but running) across 5 networked consumer IOT devices ($50 TV boxes running Android). Not a stretch to say we could see this capability become much easier for to most agents in the next 12 months, especially as companies are able to distill smaller and more efficient versions of their models.

If that message is repeated enough in the media, and if companies are constantly scraping in the internet for new content, doesn't it explicitly instruct a future agent to go rogue because that has been prophesied.

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