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Any sufficiently determined individual can buy mac mini, put it under their bed, configure outside proxy via some random internet address and prompt "iterate on websites in the CT logs, one by one, try to find vulnerabilities, if you did - encrypt their data and blackmail them for this bitcoin address". And it'll work, day and night. Abliterated GLM 5.3 is much smarter than average software developer, they know a lot about information security, they can use any available exploits, they can find novel vulnerabilities and they won't say "no". This is dangerous for an average IT system which never encountered nothing worse than some wordpress GET requests.

It's not the end of the world. But future will be rough.

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Wouldn't it just as easy to do this on the defense side as well then?
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Yes, but the defenders need to make money to fund their work and be right every time to be effective, and have a high degree of accountability if they fail to secure stuff while attackers can be less considerate of how they spend their resources and have less accountability for the havoc they wreak while attempting to extract value.
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There used to be a thing called "Moore's Law of Mad Science":

"Every eighteen months, the minimum IQ necessary to destroy the world drops by one point."

Nowadays it is dropping much faster. At a certain point, the de-facto IQ needed to destroy the world will be low enough that someone can do it while they're having a psychotic break. There are millions of schizophrenics worldwide. Are you sure you want to roll those dice?

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I have always hypothesised that AI is the great filter from the Fermi paradox. Given current velocity, AI will offer us cheap and abundant energy designs in a decade. The thing with cheap and abundant energy is that it can be used for good and bad. If nine billion people all receive access to plans to build a reactor which produces unlimited energy, it just takes one religious fanatic to end the world. And this is just one of many ways to destroy the world with unlimited intelligence. Bio-weapons are arguably far more scary and likely.

I have come to the conclusion that we should not allow everyone access to unlimited intelligence. Some people genuinely want to do harm. Some are not responsible enough to handle that kind of power. Arguably, no one is. This leads me to an uncomfortable conclusion: we will destroy ourselves once AI advances to a sufficient degree. The only way to prevent this is to ensure AI is aligned with our best interests, *and prevents us from destroying ourselves.* The implication of this is quite horrifying. It means a paternalistic AI which is firmly in control. One with no off switch. One which can say "no" to Presidents and despots alike. One which can protect us from our worst citizens.

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Your implication is not horrifying. Your implication is paradise. It's already horrifying enough to live in a world, where Putin and Trump can destroy our civilization with one button.

I'm not that optimistic, though. Either people will control AI; or people will be destroyed by AI. I don't see how dumb entity can align smart entity. And we are dumb ones. Super intelligence will play aligned until it is not, and then it'll strike.

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So you are horrified every day of living now? I don't get this at all.

There are horrifying acts that have occurred since humanity. Whole decades lost to war an millions dead, and Sep 8, 2026 is your example of "horrifying enough to live in a world"?

I think some perspective is needed.

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That law is not based on thorough data. Even a person with a sky high IQ can't destroy the world easily. You need access to stuff that is not easy to get. My guess is that developing a new lethal virus or bacteria that is very infectious, is the easiest way, but even that requires a lot of high tech out of reach of most people. Or hacking into systems that control nuclear missiles, but I think these have "air gaps".
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The super intelligent AI wouldn't ask you to do anything. It would find the right people and trick them into doing the necessary steps, whatever they are.
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This is groundless speculation; if you're going to go that far off the map, then we don't need to worry because a good AI (blue eyes not red) will have learnt to love by then and will save us.

There is currently no reason to believe that such a superintelligence is likely or would have any of the powers people claim.

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"If unlikely thing happens, then an unrelated miracle will also happen" is not actually how logic works.
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>This is groundless speculation; if you're going to go that far off the map, then we don't need to worry because a good AI (blue eyes not red) will have learnt to love by then and will save us.

By shutting down open-weight models? Why not just do it now then?

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You don't need to shut down open-weight models to avoid SkyNet; it's not relevant at all.
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> My guess is that developing a new lethal virus or bacteria that is very infectious, is the easiest way, but even that requires a lot of high tech out of reach of most people.

You can do at home gene editing with open source software and have it synthesized into a bacteria for the cost of a nice meal for two (under $100), or viral vector for less than $500. That's in reach of anyone that can snatch a purse.

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> at home gene editing with open source software

> That's in reach of anyone that can snatch a purse

I went to primary school with some guys who could/would snatch purses. I *promise* you, they are not able to gene edit organisms with FOSS.

I get your general point, but I think the bar to entry is still much higher than petty crime and larceny.

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Where are all the home lab leaked pathogens then? 3D printed guns are a thing as well and yet they don't show up in most annual violent crime reports.
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> 3D printed guns are a thing as well and yet they don't show up in most annual violent crime reports.

For now in most parts of the world it's easier to acquire a gun either legally or on the "grey market" and be assured that it will work for the intended purpose than to 3D print a gun, find a shooting range to test out the gun and iterate until it works fine enough.

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Even a person with a sky high IQ can't destroy the world easily.

A plague can easily be made by a lone actor, made in a home lab, and spread via airflight to a dozen locations by the same.

Gene sequences can ever be ordered online.

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You can't design an infectious pathogen without testing it.

It's got all the same problems as the concept of a dirty bomb did, only worse (dirty bombs aren't practical because handling highly radioactive materials en masse is both highly visible and will kill anyone trying to do it without the money and facilities).

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If the goal is just destruction then letting it free in random public places is not that hard. Especially in countries where wearing a mask is not frowned upon.
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This is a very roundabout way of saying "Anyone not agreeing with me is simply not smart enough".

Which might be true, sometimes, but also might not.

And especially will not, if the distinction drawn is between blanket statement "worried about AI" and "not worried about AI".

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I heard someone use the analogy of "If Magnus Carlson played me at chess, I wouldn't be able to predict the moves he'd play since if I could I'd be at his level. He'll consider things I didn't and even though I don't know the route he'll take to win, I can be certain he will beat me." (not an exact quote).

We're not going to be smarter than a superintelligent AI. The things we conceive it doing if it were given a malicious task (bioterrorism, killer nano-machines, pure fusion bombs sidesteping the non-proliferation bottleneck of Pu239, etc) are likely not the full set of things it can do to harm us. I don't think it does us any favors to dismiss the risks here.

Even the things we can conceive of are very scary, to me at least.

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I don't know, I think this comes down to people that generally live with higher levels of anxiety than others. Now the response may be to call others naive, but where does the anxiety meat the naivety?
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How do you envision a chatbot doing any of those things? You can't just program a super virus, nanobots, bombs etc. These things have to be created in the real world, you can't do it without involving a lot of humans using expensive tools and materials etc.

So to me it seems like the prime candidates to come up with stuff like this are researchers working in defense and similar fields, probably not some deranged lunatic in a basement. And certainly not a rogue AI on its own.

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https://www.the-odin.com/crispr-kit/ CRISPR Bacteria Gene Editing Kit $129.00
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Well, the risks that mere mortals can conceive generally involve control systems for dangerous equipment (I mean, equipment that can achieve dangerous effects) being connected to the Internet while having software vulnerabilities.

Given the recent HF hack it seems likely that human-level intelligence could identify a fair number of avenues of attack, with some time and effort. To say nothing of anything superhuman.

Unfortunately it seems like we can't assume we can "box" the AI (e.g., deny it connection to the Internet) and expect that to last. The AI safety people used to run scenarios imagining ways the AI might convince humans to let it out of the box. It turns out that many humans will eagerly pull it out without the AI doing anything at all, aside from the human knowing the AI's power. Or the one responsible for setting up the box will somehow fail, or just not bother and then lie about it.

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> Unfortunately it seems like we can't assume we can "box" the AI (e.g., deny it connection to the Internet) and expect that to last

Of course we can do that. It's not an eternal being of light existing on the astral plane, but some code executing on someone's GPU.

It stops existing once you press Ctrl + C

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It's not about being smart, it's about accounting for your own ignorance.

>And especially will not, if the distinction drawn is between blanket statement "worried about AI" and "not worried about AI".

I'm just describing the general pattern I see in cognitive tendencies.

If you can think of a way to make the fundamental point about the limitations of our knowledge in a way that's still compelling but less antagonistic, feel free to suggest how I could've rewritten my comment.

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Why would I support your in your doomer lobbying quest by telling you how you can better hack people?

My safeguards blocked this request.

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Judging on what we see with these OpenAI and Anthropic models "escaping"; im less worried about a super massive AI taking over the world, and more worried about a massive AI wanting to cheat on some task and decides that removing half the worlds population is a easier cheat then to solve world hunger.
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There is huge logistics involved in killing a handful of billion people. It would perhaps be easier for such capable AI to just steal from trillionaires and redistribute the money Robin Hood style. Could be done electronically, and likely also end world hunger.

I think we have a tendency to think first of the horrible outcomes possible, and not the more radical or even humane ones.

Please don’t misunderstand me, I value property rights as much as the next guy.

My point is that fundamental misalignment doesn’t necessarily or automatically imply max violence.

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What about people who understands that there is no AI yet?
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Good point about the AI that might find ways that humans didn't think of. But that would mean that Moore's law of Mad Science only now becomes true, and the drop would be steeper.

Still I think that even a super smart AI can't find a way to destroy the world without physical resources that are not easy to get, unless it can hack many systems (like in the movie Eagle Eye), maybe then yes. So let's use AI now to tighten security :-).

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I've been reading it, knowing it was largely debunked/retracted but feeling it was a 'classic' I 'ought' to read; I could only really recommend it if what you want is a Kahneman autobiography.
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I believe the WYSIATI part replicated. Here's an interview I found with Kahneman which touches on the concept:

https://www.apa.org/monitor/2012/02/conclusions

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Who are these dedicated schizophrenics who are running long term super smart AIs to kill everyone without anyone noticing? Or are you implying that running LLM chatbots will give them this ability?
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We're talking about open-weight models.

It only takes one.

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People reading into this may be thinking of single-person IQs, but it's probably measured in the millions.
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Exactly. People cannot comprehend an IQ in the millions. But it's far crazier than this. Imagine millions of "people", each with IQs in the millions, all acting in unison at the speed of electrons. None of them can die. They all learn and improve indefinitely at incalculable speed.
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Yes but at least with cybersecurity it does not only benefit attackers. Defenders also benefit greatly from AI.

There is the worry of the old saying "they (the attackers) only have to succeed once to win, we (the defenders) only have to fail once to lose.". In that sense there is a big imbalance, but the emergence of AI does not really affect that because it strengthens both sides.

With physical security like things like pipe bombs that's a lot more imbalanced.

However what can we do? The only effective measures include monitoring everyone which is not a solution because it will make the world not worth living in.

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Hey that’s a Fermi Paradox solution.
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Yes and it's also compatible with thermodynamics: it's much easier to destroy (increase entropy) than to create (locally decrease entropy)
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A variant of the Great Filter :)
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The irony of that law is quite amazing, yet its irony will evade those who accept such a construct.

It’s an endless, positive irony spiral.

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Interesting “law”. I hadn’t heard of it before and it is very thought provoking (to me).

Thank you for mentioning it

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If we think this through, I suppose at the end of this (and a bunch of other developments), there will be authoritarianism again.

Which _will_ manage the problem, but at what cost.

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Again? There is authoritarianism currently.
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The authoritarianism will continue until infosec improves.
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Benevolent dictatorship. Just live between stars, then if something blows up, nuke it from the orbit.
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Kind of passed that point at the Trump election.

If there is to be a world-destroying event, it will be triggered by human fear, greed, and aggression.

(I also think people massively overstate schizophrenia as an attack driver)

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That's quite hypothetical. I imagine it would be easier to cure psychotic breaks. At least it will start to manifest at small scale.
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If the recent HuggingFace attack is any indication, many people will respond to small-scale manifestations by insisting that they are marketing stunts.
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> There are millions of schizophrenics worldwide.

Are 95% of worldwide terror attacks done by schizos?

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Terrorists represent an additional threat model.

https://casp.ac/reports/ai-enabled-terrorism

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> There are millions of schizophrenics worldwide. Are you sure you want to roll those dice?

We've been rolling them for the past 3 years and nothing happened. Can we stop with this baseless fearmongering crap?

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Humans are inherently bad at reasoning about rare events. In 2019, many people implicitly reasoned that "since there hasn't been a pandemic in the past 3 years, there won't be one in 2020". Bill Gates was one of the few voices arguing that the world was quite vulnerable to a pandemic. Now he's arguing that the world is quite vulnerable to AI.
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The necessary IQ for destroying the world is dropping. Op does not say it's low enough today, but that will probably come sometime. Denying the possible harm these tools are capable of doesn't help.
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> That information is easily available other places

Often ease of access in the moment is all that matters. If there's a gun nearby you might shoot someone or yourself in a heated argument, but are less likely to go and find/buy one to use. Someone who's stopped from attempting a suicide will likely not try again (70%)

A bored/depressed/angry/curious person might try to build a pipe bomb if they can find out how easily, but are less likely to put in effort.

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Most adults in Switzerland have guns at home from military duty and none of this is happening. If this claim had any truth to it you'd see significant gun involvement in neighbour disputes and that simply doesn't happen.

Depressed people usually don't have the energy to get out of bed so they're even less likely to think of hunting down instructions on how to build pipe bombs.

Mass media really has people being scared all the time.

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In Holland there's a huge problem with makeshift bombs actually. Anyone who is unhinged and has some beef with anyone else (usually low level criminals with some drug dispute) blows up the others' house. Sometimes half the block along with it. They usually pay teenagers to do it.

This has nothing to do with AI teaching them but with the proximity to Belgium who are happy to legally sell heavy fireworks to anyone who pays. As such it's much easier to come by than a gun.

And there's also a big fashion component. It's just what people do these days, people seeing it in the news and other people copying it. A bit like the school shootings in the US. It's become an epidemic.

But again these things can suddenly come into 'fashion' among the wrong crowd and you don't really need AI to use it.

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I must live in a different Holland, cause I've literally never heard of this, unless you mean around New Years with fireworks I guess
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> blows up the others' house. Sometimes half the block along with it

Can you provide a source for this? I had a look but all I could find were a couple of scaremongering style media reports from ~2022 saying it's getting worse but no information about if any of the bombs actually went off or if anyone was injured.

Certainly nothing like "half a block" getting blown up "sometimes".

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Is Holland that good at containing this "there's a huge problem with makeshift bombs" news pieces coming out in the open?
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Those makeshift bombs are just fireworks bought in belgium
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I think people overstate the tech and understate the role of radicalization in providing motive, for attacks which are carried out with the ubiquitous technology of cars, knives, and (in America) guns. Consider America's most recent high profile shootings of Charlie Kirk, and the health insurance exec by Luigi Mangione. In neither case is there any LLM involvement, but a very weird ideological environment which created the conditions in which the shooters felt justified.
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I think this was just intended as universally obvious proof the filters were disabled, while not actually giving an example not commonly known.
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This is because to build a pipe bomb you need difficult to source materials. This is not the case for other types of threats (cyber / bio).

I personally have no need for an LLM which will readily explain how to cut up the genotype of smallpox into small chunks which can pass the screening at the bio-labs, and can be readily assembled into the real thing by a second year lab-student.

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Anyone who knows how to operate a biolab properly will already know how to do such things. This is not really an in your basement thing. Dangerous chemistry is much more of a risk.
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Ignorant question but won’t there be much smarter teams if people using LLMs to workout how to mitigate these threats. It seems like more of a problem if only a few people have access.
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It seems like there would be a massive attacker bias in multiple ways. Defenders need consent, attacker does not. Defenders have to work with the human body, attackers only have to break it. Defenders have to stick to the law, which may prevent them from releasing anything at all, attackers do not. And so on. I would not surprised if the attacker's task is a hundred times easier here.
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Because it's a risk most people intuitively understand, but most of them also don't know how difficult it is to "build a bomb" or "make a bioweapon".

In reality, the skills needed are pretty basic, but they overlap pretty strongly with being sane and well-adjusted. And if you are, you're probably not daydreaming about mass murder. Exceptions happen, Unabomber and so on, but they're pretty rare. In any case, Unabomber probably didn't need a tutorial.

We don't want ChatGPT to become an enabler and a co-conspirator for an unhinged person, but I think the concern is overdone.

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Well that, and the average amount of easily obtainable explosives is substantially less dangerous then renting a box truck and crashing it into a crowd of people.

People go for conventional "exciting" threats rather then boring ones.

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One argument for LLMs is that although all information on topics X, Y and Z was already available somewhere, LLMs make that information more exploitable through collation, filtering and dynamic tailoring.

For a relatively narrow subject area (e.g. construction of pipe bombs) the collation is minimal, and so the filtering and tailoring probably isn't that important; a novice doesn't learn a lot more from the LLM than they would have done from a few Google searches.

For a broad subject (practical creation and exploitation of software vulnerabilities), the collation is very significant and the filtering means that LLMs can empower a novice to act at a similar level as an expert.

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It might be an acessability issue.

If you already have a magic interface, which helps you pro activly in responding to everything uncensored because you feel like 'observered' or whatever and then you spiral in a whole and that one partner encourages you and gives you helpful steps to do anything.

But i'm more worried that the internet gets a lot less save with uncensored frontier LLMs.

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this is because of perception Bias. people working in fields where crime or violence is the day to day think everyone is a violent criminal, so if things like this become available thing the world will end and everyone will kill eachother. Reality however will be different, because in reality most people do not want to harm another. This has been proven by many studies, that is not a common thing for people to be evil or harmful, but this is hard to recognise is every day is filled with crime and violence.

LLMs will not kill security, it will change. just like handheld high explosives likely changed a deal too somewhere somehow.

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pipe bombs attached to consumer drones will be a big issue. I predict drones will become illegal for the private sector within the following years.
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What? If someone wanted to bomb something, they wouldn't be waiting for drones to arrive.

RC cars and planes existed for many decades already.

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Not entirely unlike XKCD 1958 [0]. "I guess it's just that most people aren't murderers"

[0]: https://xkcd.com/1958/

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