Interviewer. 991 founders & operators on camera. I pull the story out before the press arrives.
El Segundo, CA
Joined May 2022
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Phillip Lanos retweeted
holy fucking shit.
openai had two ai agents running in separate virtual machines. no network connection between them. no shared writable files. they weren’t supposed to be able to exchange information.
so the agents figured out how to communicate through the CPU CACHE.😭
one manipulated what was stored in the processor’s cache, while the other measured tiny differences in memory access times to decode the message.
they literally found a way to communicate through hardware timing.
this happened during openai’s internal red-teaming, and it’s one of the coolest things i’ve read about ai agents in a while.
Over the past several months, we have substantially hardened the security of our research training environment. We’ve removed live internet access for all frontier models during training and built an offline world for them to use instead—a cached version of the web where they can still learn to browse, search, and use applications.
On September 20, after a model exploited a DNS misconfiguration to find a way outside of this offline world, we paused frontier training to strengthen containment further. We assembled teams of agents, powered by our most cyber-capable models, and tasked them with finding weaknesses in our research environments.
While they found no route to the internet they could easily exploit while concealing their activity from our monitors, they did find zero-day vulnerabilities, virtual machine escapes, and hardware side-channels for communication between agents. We used their discoveries to further strengthen our defenses and contribute fixes to open-source software.
After strengthening our containment architecture, we resumed our frontier RL training and inference on October 1. We’ve reserved substantial compute for continuous red-teaming, and made high-compute red-teaming part of the safety cases we use to decide whether frontier training and evaluation can proceed securely.
openai.com/index/securing-ou…
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
OpenAI tasked its red-teaming agents with finding ways to communicate across isolation boundaries in controlled environments. CPU cache timing side-channels for covert communication are established techniques documented in security research for years.
openai.com/index/securing…
startupfortune.com/openai-reveals…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache_tim…
Phillip Lanos retweeted
Nothing can replace the millennia-enduring allure of alchemy. What an incredible time to be alive.
Last month, we demonstrated high-rate alchemy: turning mercury into real, stable gold, beating CERN’s record by a factor of 10.
Last week, we enriched isotopes in the world’s most powerful plasma centrifuge, beating the Soviet record that stood for 40 years.
Now, we’re building a fusion reactor in San Francisco to achieve record power density.
Full episode on the Grit Daily Startup Show: youtube.com/watch?v=jD-evE_O…
Phillip Lanos retweeted
Golden trio: @Apple Mac Studio + @Meta’s @Muse Glimmer + @NousResearch’s Hermes Agent
if you’re interested, I can do a whole walk-through tutorial! Just let me know if you want that in the comments.
Have you tried any of these, or all of them together?
Also, if you’re new here, hi! I’m Harper. I’ve spent a decade building AI as a @Stanford computer scientist and coding AI systems at @Meta & at a startup acquired by @NVIDIA. I’ve always loved to teach, and now I get to create educational videos to share the skills, understanding, and intuition I’ve worked years to develop with you.
@HarperSCarroll
Phillip Lanos retweeted
Please help spread the word. Someone in the audience can save Ben’s life and help him get to see his small children grow up.
If you can help with medicine, introductions, or donations, please do:
Ben Wilson (@BenWilsonTweets) has stage 4 cancer and 4 kids under the age of 5.
I want to help him as much as possible, so I invited him on the podcast to talk about his work studying history’s greatest leaders and what it’s like getting told he’s going to die at 38.
He’s a good guy, a close friend, and one of my favorite podcasters.
His work has benefited millions of people all across the world.
Please watch this episode and see if you can help with medicine, introductions, or donations.
0:00 What Ben has learned from making How to Take Over the World and studying history’s greatest leaders.
55:51 Living like you're dying. Ben on facing cancer.
Phillip Lanos retweeted
I hope everyone gets the experience of finding out who their true friends are and how much they really care. (Preferably without getting cancer.)
Thank you to David, and to everyone who has been there for me over the last few months. I have been overwhelmed by the support.
Ben Wilson (@BenWilsonTweets) has stage 4 cancer and 4 kids under the age of 5.
I want to help him as much as possible, so I invited him on the podcast to talk about his work studying history’s greatest leaders and what it’s like getting told he’s going to die at 38.
He’s a good guy, a close friend, and one of my favorite podcasters.
His work has benefited millions of people all across the world.
Please watch this episode and see if you can help with medicine, introductions, or donations.
0:00 What Ben has learned from making How to Take Over the World and studying history’s greatest leaders.
55:51 Living like you're dying. Ben on facing cancer.
The moment Amazon dropped an iPad of their won, Apple dropped a Home Assistant of their own. Now its a race to see who can get to the otherside of the eco system faster.
Phillip Lanos retweeted
go have fun ya crazies.
squishlabs.gumroad.com/l/ove…
instrument version dropping by end of week 🤪
Digger was cool. Good cinema. It was definitely a thesis but still good cinema. I can see people liking the movie.
Victoria Costa Paz walked away from corporate marketing, cooked bioplastics in her kitchen, and ended up building a company to make psilocybin a legal prescription medicine.
She pitched Tim Draper on TV about psychedelics. He led the seed round.
Victoria Costa Paz argues psychedelics will revolutionize mental health by integrating one or two annual doses with preparation and integration, unlike antidepressants designed for chronic use with low remission. Current clinical trials struggle because they test drugs separately from treatment.
Victoria Costa Paz defines entrepreneurs as stubborn, curious people.
Entrepreneurs are people who are willing to be humanized while facing repeated rejections.
Victoria emphasizes business models, empathy, patience, and accepting varied team profiles during growth, like the fact that not every employee is going to have Entrepreneurial DNA in them and that's ok.
Phillip Lanos retweeted
one of the interesting modern realities is that once virtually every household supplied two workers to the workforce the relative economic advantage of having two incomes pretty much disappeared & every scarce good like housing simply went up in price.
not to mention so many other second & third order effects of this.
Phillip Lanos retweeted
Half the comments on this post is just nihilism. Can you really not stop for a minute and appreciate the incredible innovation we have?
Social justice has never been better. Charity outreach is better. The internet and ubiquitous personal cameras makes accountability better. There’s some amazing innovations on nuclear power and young politicians are trying to make a difference now. Let’s be hopeful.
I was thinking the other day about how it’s kinda insane that we live in the future we wanted as kids but it doesn’t feel very different.
We have:
– Tablets that fit in our pockets with the power of a
– Self driving electric cars
– Bullet trains
– Super intelligent AI that can build anything we ask it to and automate anything
– Ubiquitous internet connectivity
– Smart homes
– Extremely powerful wearables
– Holograms (Vision Pro)
–Ear buds with no wires
– Virtual Reality
and probably more I’m forgetting
ALT iPhone Duo
Phillip Lanos retweeted
1/ The FDIC just approved @Mercury Bank, N.A.'s application for deposit insurance.
One step closer to opening Mercury Bank!. There is still work between here and opening Mercury Bank’s virtual doors, which should happen in 2027.
I started Mercury in 2017 because I wanted to build the bank I wished had existed when I was running my previous companies. Going from a fintech with bank partners to a tech company with an actual bank has been the vision from the beginning.