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Comment by heaney-555 | Hacker News Reader

These agent swarms are from inside OpenAI, with the safeguards built into the public API disabled.

Russia does not have access to this, and as with all western tech companies, AI providers do what they can to prevent Russian usage of their products at all.

As for open-source models, Russia's electricity grid is under severe strain with the Ukraine war, and only recently has it started building out serious sovereign compute capacity.

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Couldn't they use frontier open-weight models from Chinese labs? The current Chinese government is friendly to them.

Russia is running out of refined oil to power their economy. They probably aren't capable of spinning up datacenters to run those.

They don’t need to run their own DCs, just pay for a proxy somewhere in the world that has better access to the infrastructure. We know North Korea has been doing that in the US since years now

The cost would be between 100k-250k, to run approx 88 agents leveraging the best open source models available.

I'm just saying, where this is actually applicable we are not seeing it being demonstrated. You would presume the entire energy infrastructure of Europe would be under constant AI hacking barrage, criminal enterprise would be breaking into poorly secured financial institutions and r/r4r posts would be littered Ai con-artists.

I'm just wondering, again, is this mostly bullshit?

Why do you think they're not, and why do you think Russia cares about Reddit?

It’s an example of potential use by bad actors.

Did you skip the last paragraph? Not a great time to be building data centers in Russia. Models are nothing without computers to run them

Russia can use fake accounts and VPNs to run their agents in data centers in neutral countries.

And which of these neutral countries have the capacity to serve them and the lack of awareness that hosting an offensive Russian agent swarm would bring hell back to their doorstep? Best they can do right now is rented botnets

Um... China?

No one is attacking China

I appreciate this line of questioning. It's really interesting to see how many excuses people need to reach for to avoid the conclusion that the "secret unheard of power" is B.S...

The Chinese models are benchmaxxed to hell. They aren't as good in practice as all the hype suggests.

There are several ways to get hold of tech and of any other thing. Russia did not have access to the H-bomb too, until it was handed to them. Ideals or money are very effective.

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