A neocloud security gap exposed other customers’ workloads

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 39:39

   yeah so we we posted an article titled most neoclouds suck at security um document by the way the art for that uh is is incredible we'll put it on the screen uh for those who are watching it's like this guy getting yeah exactly getting stabbed by everybody and it's like it's soc2 compliant um but yeah so we posted that report and then uh that you know like maybe eight or eight hours later or whatever ilia uh posted his tweet um because they are very much um you know using various clouds um they're obviously super secretive um and care a lot about the secrecy of like what they're working on but also they are big believers in super intelligence um you know i guess safe super intelligence ssi they were the first you know trump actually copied ilia Ilya's first with another one, right?

2. 40:33

   First to reasoning, first to LLM scaling, and now first to super intelligence branding. But Ilya sort of tweeted that out and sort of echoed what we wrote, right? Which is like, look, most of these clouds are terrible at security. You can get open source models to just hack NeoClouds or get access to stuff within NeoClouds. You know, GLM 5.3 especially is like really good at this. So open source Chinese models can just hack dozens of the Neo clouds that exist out there and you can go look at what other people are doing. And so we've seen stuff like this. At other clouds, there was a cloud that you know, we didn't even intend to, but we just accidentally ended up like seeing all of the other clients on that cluster, seeing what stuff they had in storage, see what stuff they had in slurm, etc. And there were

3. 41:21

   like, intelligence agencies, right? Like, so we immediately like reported it to them were like yo Which intelligence agencies? We cannot say. I don't think that's a valid thing to say. National, like federal, well, security agencies and governments. They were not American. They were not American, but we said it was for a country that has a top 10 GDP. It's not like some tiny country. I'm losing my mind here that that was possible.

4. 41:50

   Yeah, it's like if we were malicious, and by the way, there were probably a dozen other customers, and maybe one of them was malicious, we could have just seen what they were training. Right. And they were training models and running models for their themselves, presumably, because this is a GPU infrastructure. So what else would you do with a bunch of Blackwell GPUs? Yeah, we throw around this word sovereign AI, and it gets entangled with the concept of a neocloud many times. And people, even when they're raising money, they use this word a lot because they view compute as infrastructure. And I think that's exactly right. This is just like the telecommunications build out where this infrastructure is viewed by the sovereign nations that are deploying it and are involved in this as an asset that the country would like to control and have sovereignty over.

5. 42:36

   And they believe that similar to what you're saying at the beginning of the show, they want to be a net token importer or exporter. And that is driven by the infrastructure they build, which means data centers with GPUs inside of it. And so I think it's actually no surprise that federal government research and intelligence agencies are on some of these clusters sharing infrastructure with others. You would like them to have an air gap data center. But if there's exactly one facility in the entire country with GB300, NVL 72, I mean, it's a seller's market.