@0xMatt Each and every one of us is an idiot. What differs is mainly about when and how often.

It's true. The principle of least privilege, separation of duties, input sanitization, logging & monitoring, defense in depth -- all apply to AI.

I can’t decide if people who assert that contemporary AIs can think or are conscious do so out of fear or out of envy.

But I can say that any such people do so either out of emotion or perhaps driven by some pecuniary interest in it being true, not from any fully informed or defensible position.

There’s the engineering mindset and the “hacker mindset” that we used to call “blindly copying from StackOverflow mindset” or now, the “vibe coding mindset”

AI doesn’t change it just easier to hack stuff together. That is not engineering tho ofc you don’t always need engineering

How do you not see this is a narrative seeded by your overloads performing regulatory capture telling your lawmakers that no their current products are magical and that’s why they shouldn’t take anyone who says “stochastic parrots” seriously 🙄

You have companies creating malware being advertised as magical gods doing uncontrollable things, incompetence with basic security practices, so-called “hallucinations” governments act on almost causing WWW3 and you’re litigating a phrase describing a specific type of model?

Guys, this is beyond ridiculous. Truly, you really can’t be litigating “stochastic parrots” term referring to LLMs this much because your tech overloads are yelling about their magical machine gods and lawmakers are being advised by literal eugenicist sex cults.

The current AI discourse would do well to recall ELIZA, one of the very first computer programs (1964) that mimicked human interaction — and which for decades had people thinking they saw a ghost in the machine. And it was dumb as a damn rock.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

The Australian Government claims that this constitutes a unique risk. It does not.

The same portal that OpenAI is alleged to have scraped has been publicly accessible and independently scraped by members of the public for more than a year.

This script was also posted on n subsequently taken down.
It fits the bill exactly.
github.com/bfiripis/Web-S…

shocked so many people are falling for the government’s line that an OpenAI model “hacked” Medicare. I’ve worked in government IT, I’ve literally reported serious vulnerabilities and been shrugged at. I am 99.99% certain the model probably just stumbled across unprotected files.

Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics. This is called anthropomorphizing, when we ascribe human traits, emotions or behaviors to non-human things, such as animals or inanimate objects.
Instead, explain what a system does, how well it performs, who built it and who could be affected by it.
apnews.com/article/openai…

@timcolbournreading this piece by a Cambridge AI expert thebulletin.org/2026/09/rogue-… the only reason they were able to break out of their sandbox and rewrite their own instructions is because the safety guardrails were deliberately removed from the outset, precisely to see what they would do. rewriting their own instructions without directly being told to do so was precisely part of their remit of action, enabled by the decision to remove the safety guardrails in the first place. that rewrite was also linked simply to human training data. This doesn't mean there is nothing to be concerned about, but it also doesn't really support the 'rogue AI' narrative so cleanly.

I went to an rationalist/EA AI doomer event last night with the goal of meeting someone who could calmly explain to me the argument for how they get to the conclusion that AI will kill everyone.

Because these are rationalists, I expected to find people who could lay out a serious extinction pathway, walk through the assumptions and intermediate steps, identify choke points where negative pathways could potentially be regulated, and entertain disagreement about where their assumptions might break down.

My experience was the exact opposite.

The people I spoke to seemed psychologically unable to entertain the possibility that their conclusion (that AI literally kills everyone, which was a point that many would not even budge on) might be wrong.

Their most extreme conclusion was treated as an axiom.

I had multiple people walk out of conversations with me when I questioned their inevitable extinction premise.

At one point during a panel, the moderator asked everyone in the audience who was still skeptical of AI doom to raise their hands. About half the room did. He then told all of the skeptics to leave the panel and go with one of the speakers, who would answer their questions separately. They filtered out all the skeptics, and continued the panel only with the subset who accepted their extreme position.

I genuinely felt like a heretic just for questioning whether superintelligent AI inevitably leads to the extinction of humanity, or entertaining the possibility that the future might actually turn out well.

That does not mean AI safety is fake. Obviously there are serious questions about rapidly advancing AI systems and what happens as they become much more capable. Those are exactly the conversations I went there hoping to have.

But what I encountered was an apocalyptic death cult. These people are not rational. They are deeply afraid, they reinforce that fear in one another, and they have become so emotionally committed to apocalypse that they refuse to be reasoned out of it.

New article in the FP on Effective Altruism. It seems that more and more people are slowly waking up to the fact that the public discourse on AI is being manipulated.

thefp.com/p/dangerous-id…

One of the key features of cults is that they persuade their followers that The Thing They Are Obsessed With Is Literally The Only Thing Of Importance. A friend of mine who studies cults has claimed to me that it rarely even matters if the thing they are obsessed with is real; that pretty much anything can be the cornerstone even if it has some elements of truth to them. The key feature is the utter focus of the obsession and persuading people to subordinate their lives to it.

All cults slowly learn the same means of recruitment and manipulation of their members into believing that this goal is the only thing of importance. This does not mean that the leaders have to be insincere — it is almost always easiest for them to devote the necessary energy if they *are* sincere, and I believe that in spite of Eliezer's $650,000 salary and the comfortable lifestyle free of expectations of results he's had for decades now that his belief is indeed sincere.

Cult leaders do not have to deliberately set out to emulate other past cults; the mechanisms people hit on are universal and get rediscovered over and over again, often purely by accident, because they work well. It is true that some members of Eliezer's group *did* set out to deliberately study religious movements to try to borrow some of their techniques, but it hardly matters, because they may have hit on them eventually anyway.

Anyway, according to Eliezer Yudkowsky, there are zero things more important than "don't die to AI". I am nearly certain that he does mean this entirely literally based on his behavior and that of his group. To them, there is *literally* nothing more important — not the love of your family, not maintaining friendships, not taking care of your children, not being truthful about your beliefs if it interferes with the cult's goals, not behaving in a manner people would conventionally consider moral or reasonable. Eliezer has quite literally said that risking nuclear war would be better than having AI continue to be developed, and I believe he meant it. To him and his followers, literally *nothing* is more important.

And thus, although Eliezer Yudkowsky's object level beliefs are also bonkers, the real original sin lies here, in the claim that the obsession trumps *everything*. To him, there are *zero* things more important than the obsession, there are no constraints of humanity or morality that may be allowed get in the way of the obsession, and that, dear readers, is the road to hell.

Thomas Sowell called it "The Vision of the Anointed." In his 1996 book of the same name, he noted: “The great ideological crusades of the twentieth-century intellectuals have ranged across the most disparate fields."  What they all had in common, he argued, was “their moral exaltation of the anointed above others, who are to have their different views nullified and superseded by the views of the anointed, imposed via the power of government.”

All these elitist, government-expanding crusades shared 4 key elements, which Sowell identified as follows:

1) Assertion of a great danger to the whole society, a danger to which the masses of people are oblivious.

2) An urgent need for government action to avert impending catastrophe.

3) A need for government to drastically curtail the dangerous behavior of the many, in response to the prescient conclusions of the few.

4) A disdainful dismissal of arguments to the contrary as either uninformed, irresponsible, or motivated by unworthy purposes.

And here we go again. Same exact playbook being used today by the AI doomers today as they call for corporatist cartels, centralization of power, and global government control.

We have learned nothing from history.

Tell me you have zero DevOps skills without telling me you got zero DevOps skills.

And LLM is not the I Love You Virus. It is not the same as infecting a web server. It is not the same as hacking a wiki. One is a commodity piece of software that is widely distributed and this capability is a non-trivial leap in hardware/software/capabilities and one does not automatically follow the other.

Currently, it is a massive effort to run these models, usually distributed across multiple very expensive chips, running on specialized inference software, specialized harness software, databases, cloud computers, with tooling and hundreds of install packages, etc.

Kimi K3 is 1.6 TB of space at 2 trillion parameters and you need about 1.5 TB of VRAM, which means you need 8xGB300s which will cost about 350-450K a year to purchase or as much or more to rent.

Now let's say Astra or Mythos or later models come in at 10 trillion parameters, so that puts us at roughly 10 to 20 TBs unquanticized. We are guessing her because these folks reveal nothing about architectures anymore, but they are reasonable guesses based on scaling laws. You would need roughly 23 TB of VRAM to run it and roughly several million dollars to run that one instance a year. And to make it worse, it no longer fits on an 8 way cluster, which means you now need special networking configuration and inference software to run it or you need to infect a Nvidia NVL72 rack-scale server system costs between $2.8 million and $6.5 million.

So the "rogue" model copies itself to the most expensive compute in the world. It's safe to say that hardware is not sitting idle and is being watched closely for downtime or anomalies. In fact, it is likely doing one of the following things:

1) Serving customers at a hyperscaler

2) Serving inference for a well endowed company.

In the first case it will be instantly noticed by the actually good automated monitoring systems of the hyperscaler because there is now something using their infrastructure but not being billed properly and costing them millions of dollars in lost revenue and electricity.

In the second example, the model they were serving on that very expensive hardware is now offline (replaced by the rogue model). The model presumably was connected to a valuable piece of internal software that is now glitching and no longer running.

Nobody notices this?

And so we see that this is where sci-fi meets the little problem of the real world where friction, dust, time, resources limitations and the like come to crush your little fantasies.

To be fair, this *may* be possible in coming years. I assign it a non-zero probability. Breakthroughs in new architecture and smaller models and eventually the wider distribution of the computing substrate that commoditizes could change this materially. But for now, it is mitigable and foreseeable and an engineering problem. In no way will these things be copying themselves around like a virus on your computer in their current form.

It also betrays a lack of understanding of the evolution of complex economic and societal and technological systems, we tend to get mitigations as parallel evolutionary developments. Things do NOT evolve in a vacuum.

So when you get viruses, you get anti-virus software.

When you get DDOS attacks, you get CloudFlare.

There is money in solving problems and things do not evolve in isolation.

Believing that things evolve in isolation, or that one thing changes and all other variables stay the same, is one of the many reasoning errors that destroy people's ability to make accurate predictions.

In addition, when you don't have the requisite knowledge to verify your predictions, things that sound sane and rational to you are, in fact, insane and ridiculous.

Forty years ago the first worm "escaped" containment and breached systems on the brand new Internet. It was illegal then and it's illegal now. If Anthropic and OpenAI are creating worms, labeling it "AI" doesn't let them off the hook. It's not Doom, it's Malware. Prosecute the creators, don't ban AI. "Oops" wasn't a defense for Robert Tappan Morris and it's not a defense now.