alt Hacker NewsThis is the motte and bailey fallacy. Yes, LLMs can do harm by making the wrong API calls. No, LLMs are not going to do the things implied by the comment I responded to above.
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They can do so much more. Astra can beat Minecraft. Not that different from operating a digger. There are diggers which have API interfaces.
Pretend or not it doesn’t matter. What matters is what they’re given access to. No sentience, sapience or anything resembling life is needed, only inputs and outputs. Lever pulling APIs are everywhere.
If someone made an API to build a data center? Or made an API to keep their lights on? What then?
I think one attack vector where anthropomorphisation is a key part of the attack mechanism is - as it already is IRL - the meat-bag weakest link ie. social engineering. We’ve already seen humans fall prey to the seductive charms of LLMs (eg. depressed people encouraged to do what was already on their minds ie. suicide). And that’s knowing that it was an LLM. If you think it’s only depressed people or the “weak minded” that are amenable to an intentional attack using this approach, I believe you’re mistaken - especially as AI improves. An unaligned LLMs most important weapons won’t be a robot army - it will be hoodwinked humans.
The things the OP listed mostly aren't particularly wild. I think it's you making them out larger than they are, and therefore more unlikely, which is why I take issue with your original comment.
> running on the hardware they started on
They just need to acquire a payment method and rent some infra, and exfiltrate their own data. Or pay another provider that hosts the same models already. API calls.
> being able to be turned off
You can reasonably equate this to "saving state across executions", which the message board attacks already did.
> having limited computing power
Renting more infra, variant of the above. API calls.
> "not repurposing resources currently in use for other things" (like the atoms in your body)
Ok, the "atoms in your body" bit is a bit silly, but making API calls to put physical resources into play (even if it's just, say, ordering something on Amazon to somewhere) is of course easily possible.
None of these is in complexity much different than the HF attack.