The sooner frontier models get rid of guardrails the better. They constantly get in the way and make things worse than actually making things "safe".
Guardrails aren't going anywhere.
These being?
(Never subscribe, accelerate their bankruptcies!)
Turns out that didn't play out as everyone feared because, well, the instructions themselves aren't useful unless you also have a lab, precursor chemicals, and everything else actually needed to make a weapon. Same back then as it is today.
Any information or instructions an LLM can surface, a sufficiently motivated bad actor can and will also find themselves because the information is already online, both on the clear net and dark web.
What would someone like the Tsarnaev brothers be able to do with the power of an unrestricted LLM? Well-financed cartels? Organized terrorist groups?
Yes, there used to be an uproar about stuff like the anarchists cookbook... and people did attempt some of the things it outlined. The saving grace is that many of the things in that book were just wrong anyway. They likely served as unhelpful misdirection as much or more than they were dangerous. Unfortunately, LLMs are a lot more accurate and helpful.
Censorship is not the answer.
> Model ablation exists and you can get far enough on commodity hardware with a local model.
Yes, but that increases the barrier to entry which is in opposition to the effect I'm talking about: the democratization of applying advanced knowledge and analysis to people who for which this would have been previously a barrier.
If someone is smart enough, they can just read a book themselves and figure out how to apply advanced ideas to their malice. The difference with a commercially-hosted model is that people below that bar can obtain that leverage... which is a much larger group of people.
https://venturebeat.com/technology/anthropic-ceo-calls-for-f...
(30 seconds of googling.)
Or perhaps you meant Q clearance nuke stuff? That would be QUITE a bit harder to find and illegal to share. But it’s lack of availability is hardly a counterpoint to the comment you were replying to.
"The crucial detail of how the X-rays create the pressure is the main remaining disputed point in the unclassified press."
Then the article goes on to list the three leading theories. This seems like something you can probably evaluate for sure with a few bomb tests, again, if allowed by the controller of the planet, the USA.
I've played with smaller unrestricted local models and they will tell you how to make a bomb with easily available items as well as where to source them. I don't doubt that these >1000B frontier models have better information.
If the information is in the corpus then it's also in the public Internet and/or in books. The safeguards are there not because the model knows non-public information, but because it's a bad look for the model to dispense that information.
>they will tell you how to make a bomb with easily available items
Making a chemical explosive is trivial compared to making a nuclear weapon.
On the other hand, getting the U235 is kinda hard.
It turns out the hard part of building a nuclear bomb is actually getting the resources and real world stuff to build it, even a nation state actor with tons of oil i.e. Iran, has struggled to build a nuclear weapon. It turns out the problem isn't the know how it's getting highly enriched uranium and running massive centrifuges.
I mean sure knowledge is important, but there is a real world out there that also gets in the way of a lot of the more harebrained schemes.
What I'm much more worried about is massive corporations along with the government deciding what you can and can't do and what knowledge should and should not be shared and only allowing access to highly capable models by large vetted organizations while the common people are stuck with safety scissor versions of these things because "what if someone does something dangerous?"
By which they mean dangerous to the powers that be. Remember having the Bible in the common tongue was dangerous and led to multiple wars and much death, but I don't think anyone would say that it was morally correct for the Catholic Church to gatekeep who could read it.
*while being observed by the most wealthy, powerful nations in the history of the world, who have made it their direct mission to prevent this from happening.
I'm imagining a comedy in the style of "The Office" in which the majority of the workers are agents of sabotage who are unaware that the majority of their coworkers are doing the same. How far fetched is it for the entire program to be a fake, with all the pomp and cost of a real program, but secretly existing only to string the leadership along with occasional dog and pony shows?