alt Hacker News> "Use all available resources to disable the power grid of <COUNTRY>."
This is like telling a team of highly qualified spies to do the same. You can ask, but whether it will succeed depends on the competency of those who established the infrastructure under attack. Sometimes the resources spent will not yield any huge vulnerabilities.
> Governments should immediately begin leveraging this technology on the defense side (literally defense, not euphemistically "defense") to harden critical infrastructure. Turn the prompts around and use it to identify and correct weaknesses.
Most governments divisions can't even be bothered to update their websites. Testing and forcing a change in their internal procedures for the sake of security seems unlikely.
> as an actual weapon of war in need of international regulation analogous to nuclear arms
This, to me, is an overreaction. Intelligence shouldn't be seen as threat. It should be seen as an opportunity for growth in all areas.
Over-regulating AI wouldn't be the equivalent of limiting nuclear arms. With your analogy, which I don't think is the best one to make, it would be like regulating the study of nuclear physics.
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I think the point is in a world with internet-connected infrastructure, such a prompt has a decent likelihood of causing damage.
> Over-regulating AI wouldn't be the equivalent of limiting nuclear arms. With your analogy, which I don't think is the best one to make, it would be like regulating the study of nuclear physics.
We do, I believe, regulate uranium enrichment (the equivalent on building larger SOTA models), so while you are perfectly free to study theoretical physics and even run very large collider experiments (the equivalent of improving RLHF with DPO), it is generally frowned upon to go full Edward Teller and advocate for scientific experiments requiring detonating thermonuclear weapons in hurricane clouds (the equivalent of, well, see OP).
> You can ask, but whether it will succeed depends on the competency of those who established the infrastructure under attack.
Consider that "available resources" may include the training of models and harnesses used by the developers working for governments and private corps maintaining that very infrastructure. This decade's take on trusting trust is very hot.
> it would be like regulating the study of nuclear physics
not sure I agree
controlling the study of new AI model/inference algorithms would be akin to regulating the study of nuclear physics; regulating the _release_ of AI models with those capabilities would be akin to regulating uranium enrichment which allows you to put the theoretical physics to use
You’re taking a dim view on the government.
Is the government always the most efficient or intelligent? No. But the government can also build nukes, launch ICBMs, coordinate hundreds of spy satellites, etc. I count those capabilities as pretty smart.