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Comment by solenoid0937 | Hacker News Reader

The support of OSS models on HN just days after finding out about the message board incident is so bizarre to me.

Do you guys really not comprehend the impact of giving every script kiddie an Astra-equivalent model to play with, this time without any guardrails whatsoever?

Cause I'm starting to think you aren't really thinking through the impact of power plants, hospitals, etc all being hacked en masse. People will die.

Or making it easy for anyone to make a virus (it's not hard, mechanically). Even more people will die.

Taking this to the extreme: You don't just give every kid a "do anything" super intelligent button. Open source models have a limited lifespan whether you like it or not, for the safety of all of us as a whole.

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"Open source models have a limited lifespan whether you like it or not". this tinpot dictator mindset is typical of anthropic.

Who will decide how to use the power of ai...you?

it is no surprise that the companies and safety institutes who believe that they alone may 'tame' the fire, are the cause of safety incidents. a safety test caused the explosion at chernobyl.

anthropic and openai are the danger to society.

they are the ones making the dangerous models. they are the ones using tens of millions USD of inference, and thousands of agents, to hack computer systems.

i have trained zero dangerous models. i own zero servers that i use to run hacking agents. i could run one hacking agent with my single subscription.

there are some arrogant researchers remaining at anthropic who believe that they do care about safety. those who cared about safety at openai have left.

depending on how it goes, we might need some kind of earlier intervention by the US government to take control away from the current leadership of the ai companies and prevent further incidents.

Very easy to download abliterated GLM 5.3 and start doing bad things with it, and it'll be easier when Astra-level variants are available

Just because you don't do a bad thing doesn't mean other people won't. It's why you don't give everyone an RPG launcher.

why should you have the RPG launcher and not me?

I think we're being trolled by solenoid0937. I call Poe's Law.

"Very easy" if you ignore the hardware requirements, anyone could do it?

I’d rather that capability be wide spread and “democratized” than have all of humanity enslaved to the oligopoly holding control of the godhead.

The support of OSS models on HN just days after finding out about the message board incident is so bizarre to me.

Other sites beckon.

Yes, I'm aware that the HN majority is a hyper-libertarian echo chamber that loves to outsource the problem of "technology hurting regular people" if it means they get to keep their toys/investments.

After all, who cares if abliterated extremely intelligent OSS models result in actual innocent people dying? That's <insert group here> problem. We need to be able to generate our uncensored furry fanfics, goddamnit!

State actors, professional criminals will have same or better capabilities and do not hesitate to use them. On defense end we'll have only "pay bigcorp" option.

OSS models can help to fix infra especially for folks who would never do it themselves. We do not know yet what final effect would be and it doesn't seem sky is falling now or in near future.

"people dying and furry fanfics" is a scarecrow and distractor respectively, it would be awesome if more specific examples would be used in place.

> State actors, professional criminals will have same or better capabilities

State actors do but they are not unhinged enough to use this to cause massive loss of life, unlike random crazy people with access to a computer.

Professional criminals don't have access. Please explain exactly how you expect a professional criminal to get access to a non-safety-tuned Astra/Fable equivalent.

> OSS models can help to fix infra

You can work with the vendors of critical software to fix infra first, without giving every random crazy person access to something that creates cyber/bioweapons.

> "people dying and furry fanfics" is a scarecrow

You don't think people will die if OSS models make it easy to create a bioweapon, or make it easy to hack hospitals, infrastructure, and the like? Please explain your thinking.

It's very easy to order all of the raw material needed to create a virus, the challenge is in making a viable one. But models make this easy.

Same for cyber. Hospitals, emergency services, and infrastructure like power plants are not sufficiently hardened to withstand an attack from Fable-class models.

Criminals don't need Astra or Fable. Get a bunch of GPUs, a good enough open weight model and a custom harness. What the model doesn't have in its weights it can research the Internet. How do you think black hat hacking is being done right now?

On bio: while it's easy to order all the raw material, there's the whole process of culturing bacteria/viruses/etc. that isn't trivial, and while a LLM might help in explaining stuff for rookies, there needs to be somebody physically working on it. It's not automatic. Once you get to this level, you'll find that any undergrad biologist or chemist can already make bio/chem weapons, and you don't see it happening. Terrorist groups already employ biologists or chemists that are supporters of their cause, no need for LLMs.

On cyber: aside of the question of why critical infrastructure is on the Internet on the first place (ah yes, lowest bidders, people not caring enough, business not giving IT/OT budget, S in IoT standing for security etc), if the available models can't handle cyber tasks, how can you defend yourself? See the HF "attack" that HF had to use GLM-5.2 to investigate what happened. This is the best argument for open models. Unless of course, you are the AI model creator or somebody they authorized to use their sanctioned model/harness and want to create a moat for their business.

This is FUD. Creation of business moats by fear.

The risks of open models are real.

However, I’d feel better about ceding control of AI to the government if they didn’t seem so intent on building an apparatus for surveillance/control.

Your “furry fanfic” is a somewhat pathetic scarecrow; this is a complicated topic.

Is this "think of the children, think of the hospitals" argument? Really?

Meaningless phrase used to dismiss arguments, please engage with the actual argument.

I don't think you understand how bad it will be if anyone has a button that can hack anything, our infrastructure is not ready for this. Actual people will die. Do you just not get this?

Bioweapons as well. Do you not understand how easy it is to craft a virus at home? You can literally order everything you need online. Again, actual people will die.

You are arguing the equivalent of letting everyone own missile launchers or RPGs because "open source good."

If and I mean IF it will be a (A) "hack anything" button, it as well will be a (B) "find a vuln in my site" button too. And a (C) "harden my site" too. And limiting such buttons to a few corporations does not make any sense because script-kiddies will still have access to (A).

Did you know (C) is possible without causing mass chaos that results in many people dying? In ways that don't give every script kiddie access to (A, B)?

It turns out you can give defenders the opportunity to front-run, at least on the most critical and widely used infrastructure.

Same with bio risks.

No, that's an illusion, that's the thing. You can't physically have (C) without the (A). Large corporations will spend billions trying to convince the population it is somehow possible, but the reality is different.

You absolutely can have (C) without widespread (A), you just need to limit the audience that gets the tools, and in fact the big labs are already engaging in (C) in collaboration with the government and vendors of critical software.

That you don't have access to (C) to harden your blog is a non-issue from a societal perspective, hardening the software that our infrastructure relies on first is simply more important.

Limiting progress by letting only select corporations access the stuff is how you fall behind China, UAE and in a few years even Kazakhstan.

Whoever wants to have access to (A) will have it, but letting only few select corporations provide (C) will mean majority will be priced out of (C).

Are you a shill or something?

I very much doubt China is going to let their citizens freely use AI for hacking. In fact they keep a very tight leash on corporations and their employees.

So long as real logistics systems are isolated and secured what real risk to stable society is there?

Your use of the internet may lead you to greatly overestimate the number of people who take what they read online as real. More people than you think treat this shit, regardless of the website/forum, like Jerry Springer and Satuday Night Live; just entertainment.

The STEM crowd often overthinks the impact of violating their pet theory.

Can an LLM escape its computer entirely and stomp through a city center like a kaiju? Settle down.

You're veering towards thought policing over speculation.

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