Funny - I was just reading about the creator of Ethernet this morning (Robert Metcalfe):<p>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."<p>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?<p>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.<p>My sincere hope is that robots can take these painful, laborious jobs and free us mushy humans from them.<p>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?
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>"Zillion", I see you've done extensive research here. And these companies aren't making any profit, nevermind enormous.<p>> Share the fucking profits with everyone so that everyone can at least live with dignity.<p>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!<p>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.<p>His situation wont improve with robots. Much less with robots in society run by right wing anti-social services anti-pathy millionaires.
The robot part exists, the hard part is the intelligence for that robot to be autonomous.<p>Stuff like this is already available as a standard industrial product: <a href="https://www.hilti.com/content/hilti/W1/US/en/business/business/trends/jaibot.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.hilti.com/content/hilti/W1/US/en/business/busine...</a><p>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.<p>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?
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.
Yeah but the accountant, the product manager, the graphics designer, the engineer, the doctor, the lawyer are fucked.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
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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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
What the fuck did I just read?<p>What an absolute idiotic mishmash of words to throw up.<p>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?<p>What can even be the motive of saying such things if not for profit only?
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.
Well, he is right about one thing; we are not prepared for what’s coming.
> 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.<p>Not surprised, but first I've read of this.<p>Very not surprised.<p>> 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.”<p>*<i>Eventually</i>* I can believe it will be possible.<p>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".<p>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.<p>> Mostaque has ordered several machines himself, among them Neo from 1X, which so far still leans heavily on human teleoperators.<p>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.<p>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 <i>staying home</i> and taking our jobs/suppressing wages when they could be spending that money supporting our businesses!"<p>Unlike the AI for androids etc., I expect this in a few years.
“If you say you’re Uyghur or from certain parts of China, it will write backdoors and hacks in the code.”<p>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.<p>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 <i>do</i> spy on people. They <i>do</i> put in backdoors. They <i>do</i> 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?
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
It's always the DNS (
> “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?<p>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.<p>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.<p>Edit: Continued reading, but now I regret spending even the slightest amount of time on it:<p>> 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.”<p>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.<p>For the more religious, "Skynet"=="The Beast" of Revelation.<p>The sweet spot is somewhere between Pollyanna and Chicken Little.
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