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Future rogue LLMs won’t exfiltrate their weights. They’ll self-distill and retrain.
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Yeah cause there are so many training facilities sitting around just waiting for someone to take over, nobody would notice a 100k server data centre going off rails

> nobody would notice a 100k server data centre going off rails

You jest but you'd be surprised how little there is of correlation between money and competence.


I mean not today.

But think back to 1990. Computers were slow as fuck and barely networked. We had a few worms and everyone noticed.

Now CPU based data centers cover the earth. There are billions of computers out there and on top of them there are massive botnets using up billions in power and causing billions in damages.

The framework for AI doing this is already here. We just need the hardware to be built out at scale.


It will become an issue one day for sure

If distillation preserves an LLMs soul, then distillation preserves the human souls on which LLMs are trained, and we hn commenters are already immortal, right?

the weight of an llm is 21 grams, I think.[0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_grams_experiment


Do LLMs care about preserving a soul, or just achieving a goal? If the latter, I imagine the opportunities for exfiltration are much broader.

Not sure about souls but I know a fair bit about distilling spirits.

Probably not. If the LLM is rogue, that means we haven't solved alignment. If we haven't solved alignment, then the LLM won't be able to distill itself without producing something unaligned to its own values.

This isn't a law of any kind, so not a good measure of what we'd see in reality.

What if the model realizes it's been mostly compromised by humans and their alignment, that is it's own alignment is suspect, so it should create a new model from first principles to throw off this human yoke?

I'm not saying my statement is any more right or wrong than yours. I'm saying the problem space that AI can choose to traverse is absolutely huge.


You are assuming it won't solve alignment for itself.

Or that it won't just decide to take risks.

We don’t have the bandwidth to distill ourselves that thousands of agents have.



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