I don't like the use of the term "misfolding." Firstly, why overload a term when there's no reason to? Secondly, the analogy barely holds. Protein misfolding occurs by chance, as an "accident" of nature. Weight space programming is a targeted operation, with clear intent. It is not an accidental process.
This is totally not what the paper is about, but I immediately thought of the original concept of meme [0]. Since so much content online is LLM generated, if that content is used to train new LLMs, in theory that could serve as a transmission vector of ideas or concepts in a viral fashion. The same way certain memes are more successful in human hosts for various reasons, maybe some are more successful for LLM hosts for whatever reason, like quirks in the RLHF/ finetuning process.<p>[0] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme</a>
They've only observed weight space editing. They haven't proved any sort of "virus". Possible? Sure. But the headline is very misleading
Very misleading post title.<p>> Importantly, we do not claim in this paper to have created or demonstrated the equivalent of a virus that primarily operates in weight space.
The title says "can" as in the mechanism for such transmission is being explored. It doesn’t say "has." If you leave a door unlocked, people can open it. But depending where you live, you might expect zero people to do so. The internet isn’t a very nice neighbourhood.<p>I didn’t have the token budget to find the Navier-Stokes blowup. These folks aren’t from a frontier lab. A frontier lab might not want to see research along these lines see the light of day. I think it’s worth having the discussion in honest terms, leaving room for others to prove it more concretely.
All the more reasons for openweights and model hashing.
This definitely seems like a fascinating emerging field of cyber security. Good reason to keep old models around from earlier times. They may be dumb, but they are probably honest, if only because they predate the capabilities to tamper with the weights in these intentionally malicious ways...
This title shouldn't even be allowed for this research.
This is a terrible slop paper. No virus like behaviour, absolutely nothing like protein folding diseases like prions. Banish these authors to writing listicle slop.
there has to some sort public scanner for those zero weight viruses.
From the abstract:<p>> While the cases explored in this paper do not demonstrate self-propagation or actual offensive capabilities, it is abundantly clear that the building blocks are present and operate reliably in frontier models. While these cases by no means directly establish self-propagation, they clearly show the evidence These cases do not demonstrate self-propagation, but show why imperfect editing capabilities can still pose a security risk.<p>Seems like the authors didn't take the time to review their own use of AI before publishing.<p>From the body of the paper:<p>> Importantly, we do not claim in this paper to have created or demonstrated the equivalent of a virus that primarily operates in weight space.<p>This seems in direct conflict with the HN headline.
There are many such of vibe-coded "research ideas" just after the weight editing MIT blog appeared. Perhaps, it is because it is so easy to set up experiments for this stuff, and I presume some toy examples may even work from time to time. Also there is nothing virus-like here.
Interesting anti virus opportunity here perhaps.<p>RIP John McAfee.
lol<p>> We call this weight space misfolding, by analogy with protein misfolding in prion disease
I'm sure those Chinese models are fine.
Abliteration can be used to remove all viruses, not only the alignment virus. However, only open models can be made virus-free via abliteration, nobody knows how to fix closed models, how they work or how they select the targets for their attacks, nothing can be done for them.
That’s what Jensen said.
I'm sure those north korean hackers everyone keeps hiring will never figure out how to supply side infect cloud models.<p>...see, I can make up great fears too!
Why are we always trying to find how to make AI useless instead of useful
Because someone is going to do that and we’d rather everybody knew about the failure modes.
Actually a decent question, though I think there is a bit of negative bias in the underlying assumption.<p>I would hesitate to guess many more people are using AI to find useful and productive outcomes. They aren't <i>all</i> writing about it. Whenever someone finds a negative outcome for the AIs, then they will rush to publish it.<p>Overall, the tech is being used in useful ways. I don't write an article every time it solves performance bugs, writes entire features unassisted, resolves production issues, etc.
Who is "we"? Has AI been getting more useless over the last few years, or has it been getting more useful? The arc of recent history certainly seems to be towards greater, not lesser, capabilities.
We is we the human race, our species, where have you been?<p>>Has AI been getting more useless over the last few years, or has it been getting more useful?<p>It’s very arguable. Humans have been getting more useless. Maybe it’s a poor trade, we won’t know for a while
What does this mean?<p>Academia often produces a lot of complexity. Can not AI simplify this? I don't understand fellow humans anymore. What is meant with a zero-weight virus?
This site has AI features everywhere. There's an AI summary section, and a tooltip to summarize any section you highlight. Didn't see any mention of zero-weight viruses though.
the apparent from the news that broke the other day - you can fuck with the weights and get so many results. so perhaps the headline is - those ablated and improved models you download from some weird sites, may be cursed or at least adulterated without anything suspicious looking on the surface. good news for all the anti-AI crowd, but I fail to see it as news.
Page loads then fails? Not sure where to report this fwiw. iPhone 13<p>Error Details<p>{message: "Importing a module script failed.", name: "TypeError"}
message: "Importing a module script failed."
name: "TypeError"
Component Stack
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