AI could make the internet much less safe by default

Transcript

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

1. 48:20

   I think it's very likely that we will see some government intervention, but the details will matter a lot. If I were to really take that seriously and say, okay, everyone in government around the world is sort of asleep at the wheel, I think it seems quite likely that we start seeing huge, huge scale like cyber attacks. I sort of I assume in this world also that the frontier companies continue to not intentionally make their sort of most cyber capable models available to the public.

2. 48:52

   Like, nonetheless, I don't think that there's sufficient coordination around the world to prevent models at the current capability levels of those models to prevent them from being released. So, you know, there are there are sort of too many different companies making these models and there's this sort of, you know, many of them are many of them are open weight and and probably will continue to be.

3. 49:13

   So I think that it's quite likely that by default, we will end up with a much less safe internet. We may sort of end up needing to stop trusting like the internet in the way that we currently do. So like, I don't know. I mean, I buy many things from the internet. Like I think you could see huge sort of economic impacts of this where people sort of like aren't able, like we sort of have to take a step back from like many of the, many of sort of like advances that we've seen technological advances that we've seen over the last 20 years and the course the costs here could be pretty high because if you think about the the trust that's needed to collaborate right i say i i send out a document for review to someone but imagine a couple of years in the future or potentially even now given what what we know about what what agents can do right is is the google doc link that i've sent in an

4. 50:12

   email is that a fake version of that website that's trying to get their credentials if you do stuff like that or if that's that stuff is if it's commonly known that that is possible possible makes it much more difficult to trust what you do online and makes it much more difficult to collaborate so just sort of the anxiety around these things being possible will also be hugely there have have massive costs for society right and one thing that i think people outside of the cybersecurity world aren't really aware of is like software has bugs like software as we build it is typically exploitable like i i don't know that almost any of the software that like for example you and I are using to have this allegedly private conversation for now, and then it'll be podcast. But for now, you know, I'm the goal is that no one else can be listening to us right now.

5. 51:05

   Like people, I think are not aware, like just how vulnerable everything in that stack is. So it's really not a question of like, are we going to be safe because the software is sufficiently well-written? Like it's, it's much more like how long until someone finds those bugs which allow that information to be to be stolen or leak or whatever which is yeah a big part of why i say that like in the near term it seems like quite offense dominant like ai it generally seems quite offense dominant because there's just this huge overhang of bugs and vulnerabilities in software that like there's just very little it seems it's it seems quite unlikely that we'll manage to use that like you know as you're saying sort of like that six to 18 month lead over the open weight models to patch all of this software like to the point

6. 51:55

   where models can't find vulnerabilities in it anymore yeah and many people have been safe