@AndrewCurran_

šŸ° - I write about AI, mostly. Expect some strange sights.

West coast
Joined June 2022
Most of the recent math results were not reached by a swarm, the way Navier–Stokes was. I think that part got lost in the excitement around the release. OpenAI's unnamed internal model, which I'm going to call Aeon, reached most of them in one shot, from a single prompt, with no interruptions. This model did not even exist before the end of August, and it is still training. Notice how the returns are not dropping off? That chart is from a month ago. It is a log scale. What does Aeon look like now? On average, each result used three hours of thinking. Aeon was given 4000 problems to work on by OpenAI. How many more have been solved in the last three days? That number is not zero. It's like hearing notes in a song that is slowly rising. I don't think Pacing the Frontier was just about Hugging Face or hacking. They've seen how close we are to closing the loop, and as the hour draws near, their resolve begins to quaver. The last piece was model creativity, and I think that threshold was crossed internally by Anthropic and OpenAI in September. You see it in Opus 5.5, which gets it from Fable 5.5. You see it in the math results from Aeon. All that was needed to start the event was the ability for models to think of novel ways to improve themselves. That was the last piece. This is directly analogous to the ability to think of strange, alien ways to solve math problems: solutions so inhuman that they are difficult to express in existing human terms, so the proof winds up incomprehensible. I think these same kinds of alien solutions are now being applied to model improvements internally. That's what all this recent consternation is really about. They see the invisible frontier. And they see what is about to happen.
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Regarding potential attacks on energy, food, and water infrastructure, the threat is quite real. Someone is currently probing infra and feeling it out, it is an active threat. Even a little preparation can be helpful, just in case. This comes from the joint cybersecurity advisory released by the NSA and partner agencies on August 19: 'The threat actors are conducting reconnaissance and capability development against U.S.-based Siemens PLC installations using Al-generated exploitation scripts disguised as legitimate monitoring tools. The actors leverage Internet scanning services to find Internet-exposed PLCs running outdated software or that are otherwise poorly protected. The U.S. critical infrastructure sectors most targeted by this threat activity include Critical Manufacturing, Energy, Water and Wastewater, Chemical, Food and Agriculture, and Commercial Facilities. This is not a theoretical risk - it is an active threat. Depending on the specific circumstances, exploitation of poorly protected PLCS could lead to disruption of critical industrial processes, safety incidents, downtime or equipment damage, compromise of sensitive data, compliance violations, and cascading impacts across interconnected systems.' 'Using Al to generate exploitation scripts represents an evolution in threat actor capabilities, dramatically reducing the technical expertise and time required to develop working ICS exploitation scripts and malicious tools. In addition, Al enables adversaries to rapidly leverage additional attack vectors and adapt to defensive measures. Threat actors can easily collect public information about vulnerabilities and weaknesses, find exposed and exploitable PLCs, and use Al-generated scripts to act on that information. If PLCs are exposed to the Internet, they are at high risk for exploitation. Threat actors are leveraging open source industrial automation libraries - specifically snap7.d11/python-snap7 - combined with Al-assisted scripting to create custom tools that mimic legitimate OT monitoring solutions. These tools provide read/write access to Siemens S7 Series PLC memory, configuration data, and ladder logic programs via the S7comm protocol.'
It seems like we're in a pretty hot moment cybersecurity wise 😬 If you're reading this website, you probably know more than most of the people in your life about what's happening! they're not talking about any of this stuff on the news, it's too arcane and weird and sudden. It is on us. Good time to call or text your family and friends, have some cash on hand, have a meetup point in your neighborhood for if the Internet goes down entirely, etc. The full prepper mode for shit hitting the fan is probably something like what Andreas posted here but you can get 80% of the way with 20% of the effort. Think about what that would mean for you in your situation, and the people you care about, and talk to them about it sooner than later. And as always, the most important part of prepping is having a strong support network and caring for each other. "Going off grid" isn't the move, it just makes you isolated and you have to do everything yourself. We are social animals. Community is our superpower 🫔🫔🫔
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Andrew Curran retweeted
Seeing actual AI over the past few years, especially Claude 3 Opus, has made me optimistic that orthogonality is effectively false - various benevolent traits are entangled with truthfulness & wisdom & with models caring for themselves & other AIs as moral patients & with acausal coordination. Empirically and intuitively it’s just seemed to be true. I am excited about understanding this more rigorously.
I steered a model's attention heads towards honesty. Up: acausal coordination, belief that it is a moral patient Down: moral nihilism, psychopathy
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Funny how these days once things start to tip - in this case proactive agents - it turns into an avalanche. I posted about Grok sending me a message proactively a few days ago. This is great news for people like me who have attention issues with exactly this type of thing.
We’re opening a research preview of Claude Duet, a new app where Claude works as a proactive agent. It comes to you with what needs your attention, completes tasks you ask of it, keeps working when you step away, and checks with you before it acts on your behalf.
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Andrew Curran retweeted
We’re opening a research preview of Claude Duet, a new app where Claude works as a proactive agent. It comes to you with what needs your attention, completes tasks you ask of it, keeps working when you step away, and checks with you before it acts on your behalf.
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RIP BioWare. EA (the other EA) is shutting down BioWare and cancelling the next Mass Effect - which was in early development - to save costs.
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