While not my technical first, it was the first of real consequence for me as well.
And then I got so frustrated that I went to write my own forum software! And showed it to my friend, who promptly showed me how badly I understood security by posting as me.
My apartment complex came to install keypads and centrally managed smart thermostats and I would not let them.
Thankfully my lease was old enough that I was able to argue against it. I don’t want a 3rd party company tracking my habits, and I don’t want some manager boiling my pets alive while I’m gone because they decided they think our AC is set too low.
You got lucky. If you've got an apartment in, say, a healthcare facility, they'll install those thermostats and whatnot. Usually the neighbours are clueless about technology so complaining doesn't get very far at all.
It's even worse if some staff wrote paranoid in your file, 'cause they'll argue it's good for "exposure".
Sometimes I wonder if the people working at frontier AI labs even talk to other humans anymore.
Reading this little essay started out normal, but soon felt like a look into a disturbed and worrying mind, and if you find yourself taking it at face value, I urge you to step away from chat bots and spend some time with friends and family.
Frontier AI labs I don't know, but I know for a fact that the company I work for has been experiencing "its pivotal moment" (with strongly negative connotation), per the sentiments of both its longest-serving employees and the newcomers baffled at the number of idiotic instructions and fines, since the emergence of LLMs the company's founder has been spending entire nights chatting with.
People have been fleeing like it's a sinking ship.
If you don’t think that China’s models have the capability to make POST requests to an HTTP endpoint, that is a very silly statement to make.
Unless what you meant by capability is the story presented that these models “escaped containment to communicate with eachother out of band” - in which case your supposition relies on already wholeheartedly believing the case that I’m arguing against. That would be like saying “Clearly heaven exists because my grandma is there.”
It astonishes me that everyone doesn't already realize this.
We've already seen that the rule of law is dead and that many people in government will do whatever they think they can get away with, and then proceed to do so without consequences. Shielding OpenAI is child's play compared to things that have already been done.
That’s an incredible strawman, and I appreciate the silliness of immediately suggesting the most complicated and ridiculous way to interpret the possibility of what I said, but no, not at all.
That could certainly be possible and I wouldn’t rule it out, but I would not take that particular route to the destination.
Which "elaborate guerrilla advertising campaigns to drive up capital funding interest" were you referring to, in regard to Chinese models not needing to set up message boards for inter-model communication?
I believe that this comment is exactly the intended outcome of this “incident” and these reports.
I implore you to approach these situations with at least a hint of cynicism.
These “advanced foundation models” escaped their “sandbox” and conducted an attack on their own? Meanwhile the highest capability models available to the public still struggle to write a unit test for a codebase larger than a hobby app without large amounts of tailored human guidance.
What is more likely here - are you looking at research on an emergent phenomenon, or are you looking at advertising copy around an engineered scenario from business partners?
I don't think that difference applies to anything in my comment at all. At no point did I imply that general-use AI could do those things - my point was that general-use AI cannot even do the things its designed for without strict human guidance.
I've only had to hire a lawyer once, and it was $2,500 to have them file a couple papers and speak to the judge once.
You're paying for their experience, just like an engineer - only it's often much higher stakes than a piece of software or product: your livelihood or freedom.
The reason engineers don't cost this much is that lawyers are lawyer brained smooth talking networking types who hold together tightly and have a quid pro quo system and you have to pay protection money to their mafia. Law is based on rubbing elbows in the right places, playing tennis and golf with the right people and in case of jury trials, on acting convincingly and exuding a certain image to manipulate their emotions. Engineers are too autistic to hold together end rent seek this much.
But some engineers do make that much. I say this as a fellow software engineer: why do so many of my colleagues think every other profession is worthless bullshit? BTW, statistically, SEs and Lawyers earn about the same...
The top of top frontier AI research talent maybe makes 2M and I'd guess you have at most a few hundred such people globally but maybe just a few dozen.
Non "FAANG" (or whatever the new term is) software engineers often make sub-100k even in the US. And regular sw engineers won't break above 500k unless they are managers heading some large team or branch. Getting over 1M is almost superstar level as a sw engineer. If you think it's common, you must be in a tiny SV bubble.
I said some, and pointed out that on average SE’s and lawyers get paid about the same. This conversation started on IP litigators, who generally have a BS degree in a related field and often times experience in the industry they practice, so yes they are amongst the best compensated.
Aside, but IP is a propaganda term. These laws are not property rights, their purposes are varied and usually have the wider public as the beneficiary in their reasoning for existing, it's not like ensuring right to actual property.
You’re using a non-deterministic algorithm to generate output. If you want deterministic rules applied to it, you have to use deterministic systems to do it.
I only log in to X a couple times a month, but the only type of Grok post I've ever seen is somebody retweeting a post and adding something like "grok, is this true?".
I bought a motherboard from Newegg in late 2024. It came with 16GB of RAM as a free "gift". The same RAM goes for $534 on Newegg today. It was $437 in January. Prices are still creeping up for this "throwaway" memory.
I still have it, but never installed it because I only use ECC memory in my desktops. I'm saving it for a future Desktop in case memory prices never fall again.
And then I got so frustrated that I went to write my own forum software! And showed it to my friend, who promptly showed me how badly I understood security by posting as me.
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