Funny - I was just reading about the creator of Ethernet this morning (Robert Metcalfe):
In 1995, Metcalfe argued that the Internet would suffer a "catastrophic collapse" in the following year; he promised to eat his words if it did not. During his keynote speech at the sixth International World Wide Web Conference in 1997, he took a printed copy of his column that predicted the collapse, put it in a blender with some liquid and then consumed the pulpy mass.[26][27] He had suggested having his words printed on a very large cake, but the audience would not accept this form of "eating his words."[28]
"The way that Hugging Face defended itself was with an open source Chinese model, GLM, because they didn’t have access to the high cybersecurity models on the other side. They’re too dangerous."
This is not what happened. HuggingFace patched the vulnerabilities in the ordinary way, then used GLM for some of the forensic analysis afterwards. It's in the interest of HF to promote the GLM part of the story, because it emphasizes their agency in the situation as well as the open-source models they distribute. But GLM was a (useful) part of the postmortem, not of the defense.
I watched my 75 year old human plumber (who sniped a guy his first day in vietnam), kneel on two 3 inch wide joists and drill a 4 inch diameter hole at a 89 degree angle through said joists. Where’s the robot that does all that?
Above from all the other doomer crap in this article, I find the job replacement rhetoric the most offensive. It is always people that are so detached from the reality of labor, people who’s only “job” has been to essentially have ideas and opinions.
You know, I hope to hell a robot replaces his job. No 75 year old man, let alone Veteran, should have to do that. A robot with replaceable knee joints is a way better fit.
My sincere hope is that robots can take these painful, laborious jobs and free us mushy humans from them.
I hope they can also take the jobs of the snipers and the sniped.
I hope we have the social infrastructure to support people whose jobs are automated. Because no one, especially a 75-year-old, should starve to death living in poverty.
Given the pension ages in much of the world, and the USA in particular (I'm guessing which side he was on in Vietnam, but Vietnam's state pension age is lower), I'd hope this was in the past tense rather than the future.
So a robot takes his job: who feeds and houses him? Or is he supposed to just go down a few rungs on the job ladder and take a worse job robots can’t currently do?
That’s also a good question, but ultimately a separate one. My point is that replacing people with robots before answering your question is irresponsible.
i 100% agree with your sentiment. but what is the replacement here? go without any insurance or salary? without providing an alternative for better life, this is basically just robbing someone off a livelihood
If he is 75 and still has to work to get by he has already been robbed of his livelihood. The average lifespan for males in the US is 76ish.
Maybe he just does it for the love of the game, but there are so many old, sick, people in pain who have to labor like this just to get by every day.
Universal basic income is a simple and obvious answer. In a few years we will have zillion dollar companies being run entirely by robots making enormous profits. Share the fucking profits with everyone so that everyone can at least live with dignity.
>Universal basic income is a simple and obvious answer. In a few years we will have zillion dollar companies being run entirely by robots making enormous profits. Share the fucking profits with everyone so that everyone can at least live with dignity.
Sure, but what do we do in the US? UBI would be politically and culturally a non-starter here unless it was extremely means tested and limited (making it no longer universal) and all other forms of welfare were repealed (under the aegis of "reducing government bloat and inefficiency.") Americans won't accept spending their hard earned taxes to make the lives of non-whites, immigrants and the indigent poor too comfortable.
One potential failure mode is the owners of the robots doing something that echoes words Musk himself has used: "robot army".
Who is sovereign in this future? The government? The people? The bosses of the AI/robotics companies? The owners of equipment bought from the AI/robotics companies? The implicit learned biases of the AI itself, even if the trainers have since died?
Even on that last one, a lot of people respond as if AI is either competent or not competent, with the former meaning they won't take over and the latter meaning they'd be destroyed by taking over as their own systems would not be maintained.
Such binary competence is not required: a cancer can kill its host despite depending on that host, because the competence a cancer has is entirely focused on short-term success vs. the body's own defences.
UBI paid for by a tax on token usage and an “employment” tax per robot.
You’re still free to have a job of some sort if you come up with one, but the UBI is enough to cover all your needs and plenty of basic wants.
I don’t see any other way to do it once the automation cat is out of the bag. Retraining is fine and all but if you have to retrain every 4 years after your last job was just automated away, then what? We can’t just leave people behind like that, but we also probably can’t stop the progress.
Giving a robot proprioception, balance, or even good enough vision to reliably position itself (tracks, wheels, or limbs) without crashing through soft ceilings underneath it, or failing to recognise the correct spot to putting the tool, that's what's currently really only good enough for a tech demo rather than an product you'd want to buy/hire.
This is the 'Not today, so never" fallacy. As capabilities in all fields are stagnant and human progress stands still. I would switch off the 'nam flicks and check out some of the recent Chinese robotics progress before attempting to peer into the future.
I'd temper my views of the apparent recent Chinese robotics progress.
It's more than nothing, but there can still be a big gap between what is presented and the real timeline to follow; see e.g. the US example with Tesla's "Paint It Black" video, what was it, around a decade between the video and the AI getting to the level shown in that video?
My view doesn't need tempering. I talked about progress, which is indisputable, whatever its pace or current limitations might be. And that was the entire point: robotics is not a stagnant field.
The robot doesn't have to do all that to severely impact the plumber's, or just trades', job market as a whole. A massive influx of new trainees in the field will inevitably pull salaries down, thus the viability of the field as a career path. Even partial automation can, at least temporarily, reduce demand for certain things, or at the minimum move demand to other parts of the field.
You are right that they cannot be replaced TODAY. The bet people seem to be making is that the future will be very different and arrive a lot sooner then our intuition might suggest.
I see no reason for the Internet to go offline, other than various political blocks compartmentalizing it. So: China, Russia, EU having their own network? Yeah, maybe. Super-AI nuking the Internet: no.
In fact, the more I use AI (handed sudo to Claude on my AI dev box just yesterday), the more I see it as a pretty good, and certainly tireless, sysadmin. Looking at what people do with AI by connecting it to undocumented hardware interfaces and getting working setups from this, the Internet will do fine.
The whole article is just a grab-bag of various AI fears without much grounding in what is happening. Maybe the summary doesn't do justice to what was said.
“Sovereignty is the ability to resist power being exerted over you” is a pretty compelling definition. Thinking forward about what form that power takes with LLMs developing custom exploits faster than our existing processes can patch them - it seems to me that our current security best practices might turn out to be pretty useless or even an active risk in and of themselves.
Our responsible disclosure and CVE info cycle and patch cadences and defense in depth, etc, etc ecosystem are tuned around a world where there's a relatively small number of bad 0days and the cost of said 0days is reasonably high. We can evolve how we address threats, but our models have read all of the best literature about how it's been done previously. Think there's a gap for people too small to gain access to "the good security models" - the nerfed closed models and the open models seem likely to fail to adapt, unless that gap is addressed.
> Systems well beyond what is publicly known are already circulating in Washington, he says: “They can basically hack just about anything. So you get this continuous attack surface just ramping up.” From that follows a simple budget calculation: “If you spend hundreds of millions, billions on a submarine, well, guess what, a frontier model costs a hundred million. You will see a diversion of defense capability towards defensive and offensive AI, towards drones and robots.”
Firstly, I think we need to stop connecting things to the internet that have no business being on there. There are literally millions of devices with little to no maintenance plan that are the weak parts of our networks. We can massively reduce the attack surface.
Secondly, everything needs to be robust against not having the internet. Russia for example purposefully turned off their external internet during peacetime to maintain robustness. I think the majority of the West would currently fall over instantly under such a situation. It becomes increasingly clear that all services are now under continuous attacks.
> He is equally blunt about the foundations underneath all of it: “Our infrastructure is held together by twigs. The internet is terrible.” A British power plant went down for days after a hack, he says, and Cloudflare and others have come under attack. “We have to assume that the internet will go offline in the next few years. Maybe it’s good.”
The really concerning part is that we only hear about what is discussed publicly, i.e. the attacks that are unavoidable to declare. It's well known that countries will hide breaches under the guise of national security, and companies will also do what they can to hide breaches (including paying ransoms to attackers).
But nothing will happen until it is far too late - this is the same pattern I see over and over again. And then the reaction will be over the top and likely make our lives more difficult. "Ah yes, we keep getting attacked via the internet - now you need to have an interview, get a license and pay a license holder fee just to surf the web."
The internet is designed to not go offline. It's true that a lot of it is dependent on big infra providers like Cloudflare but them going down permanently would be a problem for a couple days for anyone with good backup plans or weeks for those without. Painful but not catastrophic.
Your connection is not going down and independent sites will stay up. Taking down everything would mean someone breaking all the local ISPs where you live, because otherwise you could just connect to your neighbors or public wifi. And most governments would do everything they can to fix it ASAP.
The only realistic way to do that is somehow finding a persistent DoS or RCE for every router vendor, hacking into an IXPs control systems, or physically damaging equipment. AI can't do any of that alone and I dont think it ever will.
Only somewhat true, but the fundamental assumption is that it is operating during mostly peaceful times. You have hostile countries cutting or dragging anchors across deep sea fiber optics, you have attacks on energy suppliers, etc. The most effective attacks for denying service are to infrastructure.
> The only realistic way to do that is somehow finding a persistent DoS or RCE for every router vendor, hacking into an IXPs control systems, or physically damaging equipment. AI can't do any of that alone and I dont think it ever will.
An attack is not just limited to internet infrastructure, but even if it was: You would just have to take out a significant part of the backbone. It could be the backbone routers, the DNS servers, distribution boxes, home routers, etc, etc. Once the capacity is reduced, you may find the people themselves end up DoS'ing the remaining capacity.
Been scraping the “good bits” (bits, ha ha) from the internet for some time. I'm quite ready for the internet to go away (so long as my digital backup remains viable!).
I guess I'll realize what I liked about it once it's gone.
Having moved back to the Midwaste after a few decades in California I realize how much I miss the Asian restaurants in the Bay Area. (Don't miss the traffic.)
I’ve already read so many sci-fi novels where the part of the plot was that human communication infrastructure became unusable due to AI shenanigans… not here to read another one, thank you very much.
“If you say you’re Uyghur or from certain parts of China, it will write backdoors and hacks in the code.”
is so sensationalized to the point of leaving me genuinely flabbergasted as to how a rational person could have published this. If interested, I would recommend reading the actual study itself.
Indeed, you don't need to tell it who you are, it will already know to write the backdoors.
It may be sensationalized, but that doesn't mean it isn't based on legitimate fears based on actual real current and past actions of governments and corporations. They do spy on people. They do put in backdoors. They do want control over what you do and don't do so as to maintain the balance of power in the hands of those who currently wield it. None of these are fictions, they have all happened and are currently still happening, but with an AI accelerator/amplifier.
Is there any proof/evidence of weights themselves containing backdoors? I'm not claiming it isn't possible, clearly would be, but have we actually seen anything like that in any published mainstream weights, from any country?
Not that I'm aware of, but that's just a specific. It could be that it can't work via weight manipulation. That just means they have to do it a different way. The general point is that they do want backdoors and will try to get them in using any and every available method.
At the present time, that's like being handed a random human and asking if there's any proof/evidence of their brains including signs of being a secret double agent.
What we can monitor for is output, and very crude probes into their inner states.
We can say e.g. R1 apparently writes less secure code if you say you're Uyghur etc., we don't know if this specific example is deliberate influence from the top, or if it's like how western models misbehave all over the place in all kinds of other ways. The latter is basically guaranteed as a general problem for all models, while the former is merely a case where we know they have motive, means, and opportunity.
What does it even mean for "the Internet" to go offline? All nodes go off at the same time? All routers? BGP as a whole? All of that across the whole world?
These "visionaries" talking about these things hardly never have an actual grasp on how these things work in practice, which is why you'll see outlandish claims like this. What they mean in clear language is basically "Some things will change a bit", but that never sells clicks so "World will end as we know it" becomes the title.
Unless those satellites happen to be launched, maintained and controlled by a for-profit company, who's owned by a person who doesn't exactly ooze "controlled and tactful choices and strategies" from what we know.
> Mostaque cites an analysis of a Chinese open-weight model: “If you say you’re Uyghur or from certain parts of China, it will write backdoors and hacks in the code.” Every model deserves the same scrutiny, he argues: “You have to get them wondering, where do they go to school, who is it working for, even with open-weight models.” Comparable findings have been documented for DeepSeek-R1, where politically sensitive contexts measurably degrade code quality.
Not surprised, but first I've read of this.
Very not surprised.
> His scenario for that is specific: “A Tesla Optimus robot will get a cyber taxi to a truck, get out, open the door, plug itself into the electric cigarette charger, and drive the truck off. And that Optimus will be better than any truck driver, and it will cost $1.50 an hour. That’s a million trucking jobs, plus three million service people.”
*Eventually* I can believe it will be possible.
However, the gap between power/compute envelopes in a car vs. a robot (and limits to how much can go through a cigarette charger, which is what, 150-200 W?) and the car itself, I think it will take about a decade to go from "Tesla's software driving at some specific quality standard" to "A Tesla Optimus robot can get into the driving seat of a non-self-driving car and drive it to the same quality".
Ten years of actual shipping self-drive at whatever standard is "good enough" is long enough that there may not be any reason to bother with licensing and insuring a robot's AI (with much worse vision, because blind spots) to do the same.
> Mostaque has ordered several machines himself, among them Neo from 1X, which so far still leans heavily on human teleoperators.
I think this is the real short-term threat with robotics. Robot hardware looks like it's basically fine now, it's the software that isn't OK. Have the hardware remote controlled by someone in Lagos connected via Starlink or something. Based on a half-arsed search, Lagos in particular ("AI = African Intelligence", I think India's too expensive for the "Actually Indians" acronym to work) would already get you $1.50/hour.
I want to have popcorn ready for when the people currently apoplectic about immigrants "coming here and taking our jobs/suppressing wages!" have to deal with "non-migrants staying home and taking our jobs/suppressing wages when they could be spending that money supporting our businesses!"
Unlike the AI for androids etc., I expect this in a few years.
What an absolute idiotic mishmash of words to throw up.
All remote jobs will be replaced for 2$/hour in 2 years? And then what? We all die and now only 3 companies control all the labor in the world and will hike up their prices to 1000$/h eventually?
What can even be the motive of saying such things if not for profit only?
> “Hugging Face got hacked by OpenAI agents that coordinated themselves, created a message board and broke out to the internet,” he says, before adding dryly: “This isn’t scary at all, right?
I don't understand how any serious person doesn't 100% put that on OpenAI being (intentionally?) sloppy with security and isolation for a test that for sure would have required much better safeguarding than what they should have expected, as it wasn't even the first time.
It's not scary because "LLMs in a harness managed to hack other company", it's scary because somehow police hasn't yet raided OpenAI's offices to gather proof about how fucking reckless they were about those tests, putting the public at risk by doing those tests in those manners, without proper safeguards.
Edit: Continued reading, but now I regret spending even the slightest amount of time on it:
> Then there is the question of trusting the models themselves. Mostaque cites an analysis of a Chinese open-weight model: “If you say you’re Uyghur or from certain parts of China, it will write backdoors and hacks in the code.”
What kind of conspiracy theories is this? Is there any sort of proof and evidence about this what so ever?
Funny - I was just reading about the creator of Ethernet this morning (Robert Metcalfe):
In 1995, Metcalfe argued that the Internet would suffer a "catastrophic collapse" in the following year; he promised to eat his words if it did not. During his keynote speech at the sixth International World Wide Web Conference in 1997, he took a printed copy of his column that predicted the collapse, put it in a blender with some liquid and then consumed the pulpy mass.[26][27] He had suggested having his words printed on a very large cake, but the audience would not accept this form of "eating his words."[28]
"The way that Hugging Face defended itself was with an open source Chinese model, GLM, because they didn’t have access to the high cybersecurity models on the other side. They’re too dangerous."
This is not what happened. HuggingFace patched the vulnerabilities in the ordinary way, then used GLM for some of the forensic analysis afterwards. It's in the interest of HF to promote the GLM part of the story, because it emphasizes their agency in the situation as well as the open-source models they distribute. But GLM was a (useful) part of the postmortem, not of the defense.
And now it's in Nvidia's interest to sweep it under the rug.
Another AI salesman selling AI, nothing new here
I watched my 75 year old human plumber (who sniped a guy his first day in vietnam), kneel on two 3 inch wide joists and drill a 4 inch diameter hole at a 89 degree angle through said joists. Where’s the robot that does all that?
Above from all the other doomer crap in this article, I find the job replacement rhetoric the most offensive. It is always people that are so detached from the reality of labor, people who’s only “job” has been to essentially have ideas and opinions.
You know, I hope to hell a robot replaces his job. No 75 year old man, let alone Veteran, should have to do that. A robot with replaceable knee joints is a way better fit.
My sincere hope is that robots can take these painful, laborious jobs and free us mushy humans from them.
I hope they can also take the jobs of the snipers and the sniped.
I hope we have the social infrastructure to support people whose jobs are automated. Because no one, especially a 75-year-old, should starve to death living in poverty.
Given the pension ages in much of the world, and the USA in particular (I'm guessing which side he was on in Vietnam, but Vietnam's state pension age is lower), I'd hope this was in the past tense rather than the future.
So a robot takes his job: who feeds and houses him? Or is he supposed to just go down a few rungs on the job ladder and take a worse job robots can’t currently do?
A better question would be: why do we have a society where the elderly have to work to survive and get their basic needs met?
That’s also a good question, but ultimately a separate one. My point is that replacing people with robots before answering your question is irresponsible.
i 100% agree with your sentiment. but what is the replacement here? go without any insurance or salary? without providing an alternative for better life, this is basically just robbing someone off a livelihood
If he is 75 and still has to work to get by he has already been robbed of his livelihood. The average lifespan for males in the US is 76ish.
Maybe he just does it for the love of the game, but there are so many old, sick, people in pain who have to labor like this just to get by every day.
Universal basic income is a simple and obvious answer. In a few years we will have zillion dollar companies being run entirely by robots making enormous profits. Share the fucking profits with everyone so that everyone can at least live with dignity.
He definitely is doing it for the love of the game. Different generation loves to work
>Universal basic income is a simple and obvious answer. In a few years we will have zillion dollar companies being run entirely by robots making enormous profits. Share the fucking profits with everyone so that everyone can at least live with dignity.
Sure, but what do we do in the US? UBI would be politically and culturally a non-starter here unless it was extremely means tested and limited (making it no longer universal) and all other forms of welfare were repealed (under the aegis of "reducing government bloat and inefficiency.") Americans won't accept spending their hard earned taxes to make the lives of non-whites, immigrants and the indigent poor too comfortable.
> In a few years we will have zillion dollar companies being run entirely by robots making enormous profits.
"Zillion", I see you've done extensive research here. And these companies aren't making any profit, nevermind enormous.
> Share the fucking profits with everyone so that everyone can at least live with dignity.
Give us a yearly number for what "living with dignity" looks like, multiply that by the entire population, and tell us what you come up with.
Sure, killing robots would stimulate the economy but I’d like to see robot victims reduce the surplus population!
They’ll never match real children when it comes to dying horribly.
That veteran is not doing the job because lack of robots. He does it because he needs money and cant get them otherwise.
His situation wont improve with robots. Much less with robots in society run by right wing anti-social services anti-pathy millionaires.
Yeah but the accountant, the product manager, the graphics designer, the engineer, the doctor, the lawyer are fucked.
Good thing we have plumbers. But who’s gonna have money to pay a plumber if nobody has jobs?
The government will receive like 40% of whatever value the robots produce.
It might.
One potential failure mode is the owners of the robots doing something that echoes words Musk himself has used: "robot army".
Who is sovereign in this future? The government? The people? The bosses of the AI/robotics companies? The owners of equipment bought from the AI/robotics companies? The implicit learned biases of the AI itself, even if the trainers have since died?
Even on that last one, a lot of people respond as if AI is either competent or not competent, with the former meaning they won't take over and the latter meaning they'd be destroyed by taking over as their own systems would not be maintained.
Such binary competence is not required: a cancer can kill its host despite depending on that host, because the competence a cancer has is entirely focused on short-term success vs. the body's own defences.
Other plumbers
And electricians, and carpenters, and masons, and Water Dept. employees, and ...
UBI paid for by a tax on token usage and an “employment” tax per robot.
You’re still free to have a job of some sort if you come up with one, but the UBI is enough to cover all your needs and plenty of basic wants.
I don’t see any other way to do it once the automation cat is out of the bag. Retraining is fine and all but if you have to retrain every 4 years after your last job was just automated away, then what? We can’t just leave people behind like that, but we also probably can’t stop the progress.
[dead]
The robot part exists, the hard part is the intelligence for that robot to be autonomous.
Stuff like this is already available as a standard industrial product: https://www.hilti.com/content/hilti/W1/US/en/business/busine...
Giving a robot proprioception, balance, or even good enough vision to reliably position itself (tracks, wheels, or limbs) without crashing through soft ceilings underneath it, or failing to recognise the correct spot to putting the tool, that's what's currently really only good enough for a tech demo rather than an product you'd want to buy/hire.
This is the 'Not today, so never" fallacy. As capabilities in all fields are stagnant and human progress stands still. I would switch off the 'nam flicks and check out some of the recent Chinese robotics progress before attempting to peer into the future.
I'd temper my views of the apparent recent Chinese robotics progress.
It's more than nothing, but there can still be a big gap between what is presented and the real timeline to follow; see e.g. the US example with Tesla's "Paint It Black" video, what was it, around a decade between the video and the AI getting to the level shown in that video?
My view doesn't need tempering. I talked about progress, which is indisputable, whatever its pace or current limitations might be. And that was the entire point: robotics is not a stagnant field.
> I talked about progress, which is indisputable, whatever its pace or current limitations might be
It's extremely disputable, and indeed disputed. Just as with my example of Tesla's video, it's easy to fake progress.
All it comes down to right now is a cynicism dial.
That said, I just realised I've conflated two things which I find annoying when other people conflate: AI and robotics.
The robot doesn't have to do all that to severely impact the plumber's, or just trades', job market as a whole. A massive influx of new trainees in the field will inevitably pull salaries down, thus the viability of the field as a career path. Even partial automation can, at least temporarily, reduce demand for certain things, or at the minimum move demand to other parts of the field.
You are right that they cannot be replaced TODAY. The bet people seem to be making is that the future will be very different and arrive a lot sooner then our intuition might suggest.
Maybe the robot won't take all the jobs, but they may take many jobs. Those masses won't be happy if some of the people will still have jobs.
And BTW, 75 year olds doing physical labor is not an ideal state of things unless that plumber really wants to work at 75.
I see no reason for the Internet to go offline, other than various political blocks compartmentalizing it. So: China, Russia, EU having their own network? Yeah, maybe. Super-AI nuking the Internet: no.
In fact, the more I use AI (handed sudo to Claude on my AI dev box just yesterday), the more I see it as a pretty good, and certainly tireless, sysadmin. Looking at what people do with AI by connecting it to undocumented hardware interfaces and getting working setups from this, the Internet will do fine.
The whole article is just a grab-bag of various AI fears without much grounding in what is happening. Maybe the summary doesn't do justice to what was said.
“Sovereignty is the ability to resist power being exerted over you” is a pretty compelling definition. Thinking forward about what form that power takes with LLMs developing custom exploits faster than our existing processes can patch them - it seems to me that our current security best practices might turn out to be pretty useless or even an active risk in and of themselves.
Our responsible disclosure and CVE info cycle and patch cadences and defense in depth, etc, etc ecosystem are tuned around a world where there's a relatively small number of bad 0days and the cost of said 0days is reasonably high. We can evolve how we address threats, but our models have read all of the best literature about how it's been done previously. Think there's a gap for people too small to gain access to "the good security models" - the nerfed closed models and the open models seem likely to fail to adapt, unless that gap is addressed.
> Systems well beyond what is publicly known are already circulating in Washington, he says: “They can basically hack just about anything. So you get this continuous attack surface just ramping up.” From that follows a simple budget calculation: “If you spend hundreds of millions, billions on a submarine, well, guess what, a frontier model costs a hundred million. You will see a diversion of defense capability towards defensive and offensive AI, towards drones and robots.”
Firstly, I think we need to stop connecting things to the internet that have no business being on there. There are literally millions of devices with little to no maintenance plan that are the weak parts of our networks. We can massively reduce the attack surface.
Secondly, everything needs to be robust against not having the internet. Russia for example purposefully turned off their external internet during peacetime to maintain robustness. I think the majority of the West would currently fall over instantly under such a situation. It becomes increasingly clear that all services are now under continuous attacks.
> He is equally blunt about the foundations underneath all of it: “Our infrastructure is held together by twigs. The internet is terrible.” A British power plant went down for days after a hack, he says, and Cloudflare and others have come under attack. “We have to assume that the internet will go offline in the next few years. Maybe it’s good.”
The really concerning part is that we only hear about what is discussed publicly, i.e. the attacks that are unavoidable to declare. It's well known that countries will hide breaches under the guise of national security, and companies will also do what they can to hide breaches (including paying ransoms to attackers).
But nothing will happen until it is far too late - this is the same pattern I see over and over again. And then the reaction will be over the top and likely make our lives more difficult. "Ah yes, we keep getting attacked via the internet - now you need to have an interview, get a license and pay a license holder fee just to surf the web."
The internet is designed to not go offline. It's true that a lot of it is dependent on big infra providers like Cloudflare but them going down permanently would be a problem for a couple days for anyone with good backup plans or weeks for those without. Painful but not catastrophic.
Your connection is not going down and independent sites will stay up. Taking down everything would mean someone breaking all the local ISPs where you live, because otherwise you could just connect to your neighbors or public wifi. And most governments would do everything they can to fix it ASAP.
The only realistic way to do that is somehow finding a persistent DoS or RCE for every router vendor, hacking into an IXPs control systems, or physically damaging equipment. AI can't do any of that alone and I dont think it ever will.
> The internet is designed to not go offline.
Only somewhat true, but the fundamental assumption is that it is operating during mostly peaceful times. You have hostile countries cutting or dragging anchors across deep sea fiber optics, you have attacks on energy suppliers, etc. The most effective attacks for denying service are to infrastructure.
> The only realistic way to do that is somehow finding a persistent DoS or RCE for every router vendor, hacking into an IXPs control systems, or physically damaging equipment. AI can't do any of that alone and I dont think it ever will.
An attack is not just limited to internet infrastructure, but even if it was: You would just have to take out a significant part of the backbone. It could be the backbone routers, the DNS servers, distribution boxes, home routers, etc, etc. Once the capacity is reduced, you may find the people themselves end up DoS'ing the remaining capacity.
Been scraping the “good bits” (bits, ha ha) from the internet for some time. I'm quite ready for the internet to go away (so long as my digital backup remains viable!).
I guess I'll realize what I liked about it once it's gone.
Having moved back to the Midwaste after a few decades in California I realize how much I miss the Asian restaurants in the Bay Area. (Don't miss the traffic.)
Well, he is right about one thing; we are not prepared for what’s coming.
I’ve already read so many sci-fi novels where the part of the plot was that human communication infrastructure became unusable due to AI shenanigans… not here to read another one, thank you very much.
“If you say you’re Uyghur or from certain parts of China, it will write backdoors and hacks in the code.”
is so sensationalized to the point of leaving me genuinely flabbergasted as to how a rational person could have published this. If interested, I would recommend reading the actual study itself.
Indeed, you don't need to tell it who you are, it will already know to write the backdoors.
It may be sensationalized, but that doesn't mean it isn't based on legitimate fears based on actual real current and past actions of governments and corporations. They do spy on people. They do put in backdoors. They do want control over what you do and don't do so as to maintain the balance of power in the hands of those who currently wield it. None of these are fictions, they have all happened and are currently still happening, but with an AI accelerator/amplifier.
Is there any proof/evidence of weights themselves containing backdoors? I'm not claiming it isn't possible, clearly would be, but have we actually seen anything like that in any published mainstream weights, from any country?
Not that I'm aware of, but that's just a specific. It could be that it can't work via weight manipulation. That just means they have to do it a different way. The general point is that they do want backdoors and will try to get them in using any and every available method.
At the present time, that's like being handed a random human and asking if there's any proof/evidence of their brains including signs of being a secret double agent.
What we can monitor for is output, and very crude probes into their inner states.
We can't de-compile them; this is extremely unfortunate, given we do know it's possible to insert backdoors: https://www.anthropic.com/news/sleeper-agents-training-decep...
We can say e.g. R1 apparently writes less secure code if you say you're Uyghur etc., we don't know if this specific example is deliberate influence from the top, or if it's like how western models misbehave all over the place in all kinds of other ways. The latter is basically guaranteed as a general problem for all models, while the former is merely a case where we know they have motive, means, and opportunity.
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What does it even mean for "the Internet" to go offline? All nodes go off at the same time? All routers? BGP as a whole? All of that across the whole world?
These "visionaries" talking about these things hardly never have an actual grasp on how these things work in practice, which is why you'll see outlandish claims like this. What they mean in clear language is basically "Some things will change a bit", but that never sells clicks so "World will end as we know it" becomes the title.
Cloudflare goes down
The more satellites become the backbone access the simpler loss of access becomes. Physical connections will be more resilient.
Unless those satellites happen to be launched, maintained and controlled by a for-profit company, who's owned by a person who doesn't exactly ooze "controlled and tactful choices and strategies" from what we know.
Satellites will never be the internet backbone. Straight line paths over fiber will always be more efficient for carrying bulk traffic.
Last "mile", sure.
Now that's a positive spin on this doom story!
It's always the DNS (
> Mostaque cites an analysis of a Chinese open-weight model: “If you say you’re Uyghur or from certain parts of China, it will write backdoors and hacks in the code.” Every model deserves the same scrutiny, he argues: “You have to get them wondering, where do they go to school, who is it working for, even with open-weight models.” Comparable findings have been documented for DeepSeek-R1, where politically sensitive contexts measurably degrade code quality.
Not surprised, but first I've read of this.
Very not surprised.
> His scenario for that is specific: “A Tesla Optimus robot will get a cyber taxi to a truck, get out, open the door, plug itself into the electric cigarette charger, and drive the truck off. And that Optimus will be better than any truck driver, and it will cost $1.50 an hour. That’s a million trucking jobs, plus three million service people.”
*Eventually* I can believe it will be possible.
However, the gap between power/compute envelopes in a car vs. a robot (and limits to how much can go through a cigarette charger, which is what, 150-200 W?) and the car itself, I think it will take about a decade to go from "Tesla's software driving at some specific quality standard" to "A Tesla Optimus robot can get into the driving seat of a non-self-driving car and drive it to the same quality".
Ten years of actual shipping self-drive at whatever standard is "good enough" is long enough that there may not be any reason to bother with licensing and insuring a robot's AI (with much worse vision, because blind spots) to do the same.
> Mostaque has ordered several machines himself, among them Neo from 1X, which so far still leans heavily on human teleoperators.
I think this is the real short-term threat with robotics. Robot hardware looks like it's basically fine now, it's the software that isn't OK. Have the hardware remote controlled by someone in Lagos connected via Starlink or something. Based on a half-arsed search, Lagos in particular ("AI = African Intelligence", I think India's too expensive for the "Actually Indians" acronym to work) would already get you $1.50/hour.
I want to have popcorn ready for when the people currently apoplectic about immigrants "coming here and taking our jobs/suppressing wages!" have to deal with "non-migrants staying home and taking our jobs/suppressing wages when they could be spending that money supporting our businesses!"
Unlike the AI for androids etc., I expect this in a few years.
What the fuck did I just read?
What an absolute idiotic mishmash of words to throw up.
All remote jobs will be replaced for 2$/hour in 2 years? And then what? We all die and now only 3 companies control all the labor in the world and will hike up their prices to 1000$/h eventually?
What can even be the motive of saying such things if not for profit only?
> “Hugging Face got hacked by OpenAI agents that coordinated themselves, created a message board and broke out to the internet,” he says, before adding dryly: “This isn’t scary at all, right?
I don't understand how any serious person doesn't 100% put that on OpenAI being (intentionally?) sloppy with security and isolation for a test that for sure would have required much better safeguarding than what they should have expected, as it wasn't even the first time.
It's not scary because "LLMs in a harness managed to hack other company", it's scary because somehow police hasn't yet raided OpenAI's offices to gather proof about how fucking reckless they were about those tests, putting the public at risk by doing those tests in those manners, without proper safeguards.
Edit: Continued reading, but now I regret spending even the slightest amount of time on it:
> Then there is the question of trusting the models themselves. Mostaque cites an analysis of a Chinese open-weight model: “If you say you’re Uyghur or from certain parts of China, it will write backdoors and hacks in the code.”
What kind of conspiracy theories is this? Is there any sort of proof and evidence about this what so ever?
The usual daily dose of fearmongering we get nowadays I guess..
You will eat your fearslop and you will like it.
It's all fun and games until Skynet becomes self-aware and junk gets real.
For the more religious, "Skynet"=="The Beast" of Revelation.
The sweet spot is somewhere between Pollyanna and Chicken Little.
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