Those are both irrelevant to whether a "yet" response is inane. The claim is "A will happen". The response is _not_ "A will not happen" but rather "A has not happened yet". Do you not see the disconnect?
Yep, its kinda terrifying these people are in charge of the leading AI. Im 99% confident these guys will hack a hospital or something critical to convince people that AI is dangerous. Hope they go to jail when they do too.
It's bizarre to see a tech-focused news site adopt this myopic view that we don't need to worry about things that don't exist yet. Surely the Register is aware that software is a fast-moving field!
It’s bizarre. Same commenters who would say it’s marketing or hype would again complain when models show the same type of activity in the wild. At that point the same commenters would ask to jail Dario.
It’s a very common pattern and there’s no coherence here. The only common thing is “AI bad” and all commentary is downstream
Other examples: Dario said a lot of devs might lose their job. People sneered at him saying he was hyping his product. Now they complain he was right.
Dario talked about possibility of AI autonomously hacking websites. People sneered then. Complain now that it’s true.
Regulation should require complete transparency of what is in the training data, so that data can be independently reviewed for problematic training material, that could cause AI reasoning to be dangerous to humans.
If Anthropic is serious about the threat of AI, they should release the training data they use.
Upvote. Also ban collecting, storing, and using users' data for training models (see how Navier-Stoke millenium problem solution was produced). But not just data, also recipes how this data is used to train models need to be released (see how HF was hacked).
Very surprising that a recognizable news outlet actually called out the blatant fearmongering in a headline instead of just uncritically regurgitating Anthropic's claim.
This is just yet another attempt from the cult to try to build a regulatory moat so they can stave off having to compete on price, like how OpenAI is having to do on the lower tier models (among other things).
On the one hand, if they were really concerned about their software producing a self-replicating and adapting AI worm, they'd take steps to make sure that never happens. If it did happen, they'd be sued into oblivion. They probably just want to pump up their IPO and maybe get some regulatory lock-in to make life tough for late-starting competitors.
On the other hand, a self-replicating and adapting AI worm does sound legitimately pernicious. Not world ending, but possibly an end to the online world.
Would the Internet going away be world ending? Interesting to think about. I think it would be pretty damn devastating on the scale of Nuclear war but slightly more of a slow burner. At least with Nuclear war survivors can turn the Internet back on again afterwards.
I'm not really seeing how an AI worm is meant to be ending the online world. Even a 9B model is a significant chunk of RAM on consumer devices.
They talk about distributing layers across devices, but then you'd have communication on the network and hours of driving the devices full tilt to get through even a single turn.
There's so much that can be monitored to catch these, even if we assume that the worm could hack the OS's usage monitors, it can't hide the heat and power draw.
Datacenters and PCs would adapt, requiring better monitoring than the AI companies' method of letting things run blindly for days/weeks.
IoT would be tougher, but it is also the weakest hardware, sometimes battery powered, thermally constrained, lacking in memory for processing even one layer or lacking the necessary connectivity.
Anthropic is predicting doom while racing to build the thing it warns about. Behaviour this irrational suggests to me that we have less conscious control, individually and collectively, than we like to believe.
I don’t think everything is deterministic. But in meditation I came to see the truth of what Buddhism calls dependent origination: every event arises from prior causes. That isn’t strict determinism, because people aren’t entirely automatons. It’s more like an electron cloud, where some outcomes are simply much more likely than others.
The same idea helps explain why so many wealthy people can’t make rational long-term choices. They take whatever option grows their net worth, however much damage it does, without seeing that they’re eroding the very systems that give them their wealth and power. Their behaviour makes more sense as an addiction to money, and addicts will destroy everything around them to get their fix. Again, there’s less conscious control at work than it first appears.
I know this isn’t a popular view on HN, where free will and personal agency are prized. But believing in a fiction that insight and reality don’t support is itself disempowering, because sooner or later delusion meets reality. That may be why some recovery programs begin by admitting powerlessness over the addiction. Paradoxically, the admission is empowering. Very Taoist, now that I think about it.
> Behaviour this irrational suggests to me that we have less conscious control, individually and collectively, than we like to believe.
It's only irrational if you take their words at face value.
Personally, I believe there are two camps of people within Anthropic:
1) People who genuinely believe they are going to create the Machine God. For these people, the reason they continue is because if they don't, someone else might! And if someone else builds it, it's more likely to want to kill them rather than other people! (Whereas, of course, if they build it, it's more likely to want to kill other people!)
2) People who don't believe in this, but pay lip service to it. For these people, the reason they spread the bullshit around is because they think it will make them more money. At everyone else's expense, of course.
And humans being humans, I suspect that there are a fair number of people who hold both these beliefs in their minds at the same time.
You should read the report, it is interesting technically if you ignore the fear-mongering. It distributes the model's layers over multiple compromised devices.
And considering typical WAN latencies of 20+ ms, what’s the expected inference rate, 1 token per month?
Maybe I did something wrong or unaware about the tricks to make it fast, but last time I tried to play with exo and distribute processing over a few home LAN computers to see if I can run models that don’t fit my 3090, the penalties were brutal.
There were articles in my the local newspaper at my parents saying that some guy said no one but a few people know where frontier AI really is and that these kind of articles are not scaremongering but perhaps as sign where anthropic actually is in the development of their models in the lab. So the propaganda is working.
Not to be conspiratorial or paranoid, but at this point Im pretty convinced Anthropic is going to do something wreckless with thier agents to get regulators on their side. It will probably be very bad.
If you've studied the effective altruists at all, you'd know they're perfectly willing to play the trolly problem out irl if they think it will lead to some greater good. I can definately see them in the near future purposely steering agents to do something destructive to get regulators on their side.
In fact I heard a rumor that theu were "war gaming" this scenerio.
This makes zero sense to me. Like, ok, so you can install a low powered model on low powered hardware and do inference extremely slowly... to what end? Why would that be a useful attack at all? Assuming you've compromised this hardware wouldn't it make vastly more sense just to install regular malware? And like, in what sense would an 8B or whatever model be of any danger anyway? I've used local LLMs and 8B
kind of sucks. Is it going to write bad poems on my TV or something?
Also, while I don't believe in the doomsday narrative.. hey maybe don't do things that are functionally useless but seems designed to create this doomsday in the first place? Like you can't say "oh we're so scared" and do stuff like this without completely losing your credibility.
There are physical limits that stand in the way of that, not sure where people get the idea that some magical compression algo is on the horizon. Even with ternary you're not getting opus lvl Intelligence to fit in a small model. Its actually just not possible, and hardly anyone is focused on that so I definately don't see it happening by 2030. I dont gamble, but if I did, I would go full Kelly and bet my net worth at 10:1
It would be a useful attack due to the surface area of compute: the total surface area and the decentralization.
8B models aren't very good, but there are some parallelizable workloads which would benefit from a surface area as large as here. I would think database search is parallelizable in this way.
Your fridge is searching for needles in haystacks.
Step 1: Spread nonsense FUD about open-weight models.
Step 2: All of the clueless mainstream media sites repost it (e.g. CNBC, Reuters, etc.), regurgitating Anthropic's talking points.
Step 3: Equally clueless politicians read those mainstream sites and get scared.
Step 4: They contact Dario to ask about it.
Step 5: Dario tells them, "well, you know... this is only a problem with open weight models; if there are no open weights to replicate then this cannot happen".
Not only that it would be extremely slow, but there's another thing - they are talking about tokens as some omnipotent God's sent signals. It doesn't matter what the speed is if the tokens don't make sense. Let's take current king of the small models Qwen 3.8 27B. It's a good model, but it hallucinates way more than the frontier models and often diverges even from the very explicit instructions. There's no foreseeable future where small models could somehow productively coordinate among themselves to do anything practical.
The point, which Anthropic's report makes clear but the Register for some reason did not bother to mention, is that such a capability would defeat the "you can just turn it off" model of safe LLM deployment.
In particular, I've seen a lot of people say that our response to things like the Hugging Face swarm should be to prosecute whoever chose to run the swarm. If this kind of replication becomes possible, that won't work, because we will have to deal with swarms that nobody chose to run.
These models couldn't code their way out of a paper bag and the frontier labs are still putting them in sandboxes made of thinly stretched cotton candy. It seems like their incentives are much more aligned with shutting down open source or Chinese opposition and not borne out of a "fear" of the models themselves.
Don't you think it might be better to evaluate the factual content of their concerns, rather than engaging in ad hoc psychoanalysis of their incentives and emotions?
When, specifically, did Charlie Munger state this rule? I don’t want to be presumptuous, but from what Google shows me, I’m pretty suspicious that he did not actually say this.
I'm sorry, but there will always be a human responsible for setting them up in such a way that they can do this. It doesn't matter how many layers of (supposed) "machine agency" you put in between the human and the actual harm; the human put them in a position where they could do this, so the human is responsible, liable, and culpable.
> The point... is that such a capability would defeat the "you can just turn it off" model of safe LLM deployment.
With the same success you can argue that we can't turn off conventional malware, which can also replicate. On the other hand, LLM replication is much slower and cumbersome, so it's much easier to detect and stop, even the existing anti-virus tools should work against it with great success. Obviously defeating the "turn off" strawman proves exactly nothing.
> In particular, I've seen a lot of people say that our response to things like the Hugging Face swarm should be to prosecute whoever chose to run the swarm.
Copying whatever on another machine without authorization is already a crime, every replication initiated by the original agent or its offspring is a crime committed by the person who deployed the original, the laws dealing with malware intrusions already know who to prosecute.
You appear to be seriously confused by treating bots as independent lifeforms and you fail to see their close similarity to malware and other software.
Uhm yeah I don't think they're saying it's likely now, just that it's very likely in future. The Register is being quite dumb here.
Though I suspect the way we'll get "wild AI" first is through cloud services paid for by cybercrime rather than IoT botnets - they're too underpowered.
The IPO failures last week are not depicting a market that’s keen for a $2T Anthropic.
In the bizzare world of today, rather than trying to convince folks that they have a viable business the AI labs appear fully dedicated to finding a story, any story, that lets them off the hook for tough business and financial questions they seemingly don’t have basic and good answers for.
“We’d be doing awesome financially right now, but we had to slow down because of the killer self replicating bots… humanity over profit!” is not a messaging that’s going to work in the public markets to explain quarter after quarter of massive losses.
There is no scientific evidence' for any of anthropics claims, I don't understand why people still give them the benefit of the doubt. These are flimsy legal protections for a felony racket.
Reminder that it's very convenient to believe these type of word swap lies when times are good, but if you choose to believe them then times won't be good for very long.
BugsJustFindMe | 16 hours ago
Whatever your feelings about small AI models, "it hasn't happened yet" is a really dumb reaction to a prediction about a rapidly advancing future.
skeledrew | 15 hours ago
BugsJustFindMe | 15 hours ago
none_to_remain | 16 hours ago
lifeisloving | 15 hours ago
chews | 16 hours ago
SpicyLemonZest | 16 hours ago
simianwords | 15 hours ago
It’s a very common pattern and there’s no coherence here. The only common thing is “AI bad” and all commentary is downstream
Other examples: Dario said a lot of devs might lose their job. People sneered at him saying he was hyping his product. Now they complain he was right.
Dario talked about possibility of AI autonomously hacking websites. People sneered then. Complain now that it’s true.
simianwords | 16 hours ago
therealpygon | 16 hours ago
News outlets always seem to forget “again” in the title.
keyle | 16 hours ago
preommr | 15 hours ago
These llms are smart enough to cause mass extinction by adjusting the heat in the room with cpus to escape air-gapped sandboxes, and you're laughing?
keyle | 11 hours ago
SanjayMehta | 16 hours ago
OtomotO | 15 hours ago
tzu321 | 15 hours ago
If Anthropic is serious about the threat of AI, they should release the training data they use.
novaRom | 13 hours ago
hgoel | 16 hours ago
This is just yet another attempt from the cult to try to build a regulatory moat so they can stave off having to compete on price, like how OpenAI is having to do on the lower tier models (among other things).
ggsp | 15 hours ago
beloch | 16 hours ago
On the other hand, a self-replicating and adapting AI worm does sound legitimately pernicious. Not world ending, but possibly an end to the online world.
theteapot | 15 hours ago
hgoel | 15 hours ago
They talk about distributing layers across devices, but then you'd have communication on the network and hours of driving the devices full tilt to get through even a single turn.
There's so much that can be monitored to catch these, even if we assume that the worm could hack the OS's usage monitors, it can't hide the heat and power draw.
Datacenters and PCs would adapt, requiring better monitoring than the AI companies' method of letting things run blindly for days/weeks.
IoT would be tougher, but it is also the weakest hardware, sometimes battery powered, thermally constrained, lacking in memory for processing even one layer or lacking the necessary connectivity.
N_Lens | 16 hours ago
I don’t think everything is deterministic. But in meditation I came to see the truth of what Buddhism calls dependent origination: every event arises from prior causes. That isn’t strict determinism, because people aren’t entirely automatons. It’s more like an electron cloud, where some outcomes are simply much more likely than others.
The same idea helps explain why so many wealthy people can’t make rational long-term choices. They take whatever option grows their net worth, however much damage it does, without seeing that they’re eroding the very systems that give them their wealth and power. Their behaviour makes more sense as an addiction to money, and addicts will destroy everything around them to get their fix. Again, there’s less conscious control at work than it first appears.
I know this isn’t a popular view on HN, where free will and personal agency are prized. But believing in a fiction that insight and reality don’t support is itself disempowering, because sooner or later delusion meets reality. That may be why some recovery programs begin by admitting powerlessness over the addiction. Paradoxically, the admission is empowering. Very Taoist, now that I think about it.
danaris | 7 hours ago
It's only irrational if you take their words at face value.
Personally, I believe there are two camps of people within Anthropic:
1) People who genuinely believe they are going to create the Machine God. For these people, the reason they continue is because if they don't, someone else might! And if someone else builds it, it's more likely to want to kill them rather than other people! (Whereas, of course, if they build it, it's more likely to want to kill other people!)
2) People who don't believe in this, but pay lip service to it. For these people, the reason they spread the bullshit around is because they think it will make them more money. At everyone else's expense, of course.
And humans being humans, I suspect that there are a fair number of people who hold both these beliefs in their minds at the same time.
justforfunhere | 15 hours ago
realaleris149 | 15 hours ago
solidasparagus | 15 hours ago
drdaeman | 15 hours ago
Maybe I did something wrong or unaware about the tricks to make it fast, but last time I tried to play with exo and distribute processing over a few home LAN computers to see if I can run models that don’t fit my 3090, the penalties were brutal.
solidasparagus | 3 hours ago
_ink_ | 15 hours ago
By chaining several devices
anonzzzies | 15 hours ago
iamniels | 15 hours ago
anonzzzies | 11 hours ago
lifeisloving | 15 hours ago
If you've studied the effective altruists at all, you'd know they're perfectly willing to play the trolly problem out irl if they think it will lead to some greater good. I can definately see them in the near future purposely steering agents to do something destructive to get regulators on their side.
In fact I heard a rumor that theu were "war gaming" this scenerio.
theteapot | 15 hours ago
KevinMS | 15 hours ago
OtomotO | 15 hours ago
overgard | 15 hours ago
Also, while I don't believe in the doomsday narrative.. hey maybe don't do things that are functionally useless but seems designed to create this doomsday in the first place? Like you can't say "oh we're so scared" and do stuff like this without completely losing your credibility.
simianwords | 15 hours ago
If you won’t take that bet, it’s irresponsible to ignore the possibility.
lifeisloving | 15 hours ago
sroussey | 15 hours ago
We are truly in the brute force phase of AI. Like a database without indexes, we are doing full table scans to pick 2 rows.
lifeisloving | 6 hours ago
beanshadow | 15 hours ago
8B models aren't very good, but there are some parallelizable workloads which would benefit from a surface area as large as here. I would think database search is parallelizable in this way.
Your fridge is searching for needles in haystacks.
kouteiheika | 15 hours ago
Step 1: Spread nonsense FUD about open-weight models.
Step 2: All of the clueless mainstream media sites repost it (e.g. CNBC, Reuters, etc.), regurgitating Anthropic's talking points.
Step 3: Equally clueless politicians read those mainstream sites and get scared.
Step 4: They contact Dario to ask about it.
Step 5: Dario tells them, "well, you know... this is only a problem with open weight models; if there are no open weights to replicate then this cannot happen".
Step 6: ??? (I'm sure you can imagine)
Step 7: Profit.
customguy | 15 hours ago
pllbnk | 15 hours ago
SpicyLemonZest | 15 hours ago
In particular, I've seen a lot of people say that our response to things like the Hugging Face swarm should be to prosecute whoever chose to run the swarm. If this kind of replication becomes possible, that won't work, because we will have to deal with swarms that nobody chose to run.
argee | 15 hours ago
SpicyLemonZest | 14 hours ago
argee | 14 hours ago
That rule has served me well enough!
SpicyLemonZest | 14 hours ago
customguy | 14 hours ago
https://mungerarchive.com/q/incentives-never-think-else/
SpicyLemonZest | 13 hours ago
IAmGraydon | 7 hours ago
danaris | 8 hours ago
bigbadfeline | 2 hours ago
With the same success you can argue that we can't turn off conventional malware, which can also replicate. On the other hand, LLM replication is much slower and cumbersome, so it's much easier to detect and stop, even the existing anti-virus tools should work against it with great success. Obviously defeating the "turn off" strawman proves exactly nothing.
> In particular, I've seen a lot of people say that our response to things like the Hugging Face swarm should be to prosecute whoever chose to run the swarm.
Copying whatever on another machine without authorization is already a crime, every replication initiated by the original agent or its offspring is a crime committed by the person who deployed the original, the laws dealing with malware intrusions already know who to prosecute.
You appear to be seriously confused by treating bots as independent lifeforms and you fail to see their close similarity to malware and other software.
skeledrew | 15 hours ago
kakadu | 15 hours ago
Ban open source models."
novaRom | 13 hours ago
Madmallard | 15 hours ago
AI accelerating the elite's efforts at demolishing the middle class? Very likely.
chinathrow | 15 hours ago
someothherguyy | 15 hours ago
andrewstuart | 15 hours ago
Not the slightest chance of AI apocalypse.
There is no plausible scenario that can do this.
It’s all science fiction and hand waving and vague never specific possible maybe look that way! boogie man threats.
No one ever willing to be specific about the precise mechanism that could do this.
IshKebab | 15 hours ago
Though I suspect the way we'll get "wild AI" first is through cloud services paid for by cybercrime rather than IoT botnets - they're too underpowered.
cmiles8 | 15 hours ago
In the bizzare world of today, rather than trying to convince folks that they have a viable business the AI labs appear fully dedicated to finding a story, any story, that lets them off the hook for tough business and financial questions they seemingly don’t have basic and good answers for.
“We’d be doing awesome financially right now, but we had to slow down because of the killer self replicating bots… humanity over profit!” is not a messaging that’s going to work in the public markets to explain quarter after quarter of massive losses.
casey2 | 15 hours ago
Reminder that it's very convenient to believe these type of word swap lies when times are good, but if you choose to believe them then times won't be good for very long.
0x000xca0xfe | 11 hours ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50002301#50006029
Local models are obviously not good enough (yet), you don't need "research" to know this.
ChrisArchitect | 8 hours ago
tim333 | 7 hours ago
With global warming you get told off for saying don't worry about 2C warming because it hasn't happened yet.
IAmGraydon | 7 hours ago