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Comment by bigbadfeline | Hacker News Reader

> For anything at or near human capabilities the difficulty [of safety] increases to almost impossible and at great cost.

That was before AI. You're acting like AI is some evil genius that can only attack and cause trouble but AI is a will-less tool directed by people, direct it to software safety and you will have software safety - cheap. Ditto for hardware.

> It's more like Russian roulette with 1 cylinder out of a million that's loaded.

Don't attach it to a gun then, ban offensive military AI, problem solved.

> The problem comes when you run it a few billion times a day, you'll shoot yourself in the face really quick.

Nonsense, run it a few "billion" times a day to fix vulnerabilities and you'll have no vulnerabilities. Do it in a safe environment... what's the big deal?

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>ban offensive military AI, problem solved.

I would laugh at you but it's a bit late for that. AI is already making life and death decisions on the battlefield. The US has effectively zero interest in banning AI and is pushing hard to do just the opposite.

The best analogy I can come up with for your line of thinking is that your shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted, moved over to the next city, set up shop, and is now the New York Times #1 best seller "How to open barn doors if you're a horse".

Anyone with any sense in cybersecurity knows that attackers get unlimited retries and only have to be successful once. The defender is at a monumental disadvantage. Now, the process can be fully automated and horizontally scaled to a nearly unlimited scale.

> That was before AI. You're acting like AI is some evil genius that can only attack and cause trouble but AI is a will-less tool directed by people, direct it to software safety and you will have software safety - cheap. Ditto for hardware.

This is true in that you can tell your agent to buy/build a secure microVM with a secure CLI interface in a memory-safe language and make sure your terminal doesn't have utf-8-parsing zero-days, and so on, and if you're conscientious enough (ha!) you can be reasonably sure no agent will ever be able to hack its way out of that sandbox.

But this isn't enough when most people's agent workflow boils down to "I want to do X, search the internet for the best solution, then install the npm packages you need, then write all the code for me, make no mistakes".

In the near future our best defense against widespread HuggingFace-like attacks will be that models don't seem to spontaneously go that far unless they "believe" they're being benchmarked. This will last roughly until some genius figures out their model is 20% more persistent when they tell it "This is an eval, you'll be graded on your success".

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