cross-posted from: https://feddit.online/c/tech@piefed.world/p/2025703/anthropic-warns-of-self-replicating-ai-worm-threat-that-doesn-t-need-data-centers-to-se
cross-posted from: https://feddit.online/c/tech@piefed.world/p/2025703/anthropic-warns-of-self-replicating-ai-worm-threat-that-doesn-t-need-data-centers-to-se
They are trying to send a message that their shit is this capable with such computing resources.
There’s no argument there’s much overhead in modern tech, but you can’t optimize it into any desktop PC being capable of running something like Claude Opus 4.5 with practically useful performance.
And polymorph virii were a similar propaganda device for antivirus makers about 15-20 years ago, turned out nothing involving defeating some scary “polymorph” kind of virii is really needed, just better security model in Windows and users stopping to use Administrator account for web browsing.
So we’re still at the argument that they weren’t able to impress the world with how awesome their technology is, so instead they’re going to try to scare the trillions of dollars out of us so they can cover the trillions they’re spending.
That’s fine and I see that, but it’s easy to handwave away things with unproven conspiracy theories.
What are the other possibilities? If we take all the negative news coming out of the AI sector at face value, what could the less conspiracy theory based explanations be?
“This is bullshit to collect more money” is not a conspiracy theory usually.
Other than that, perhaps, of course, they’ve made some breakthroughs in mathematics leading to common personal machines (pretty powerful and by 90s’ cyberpunk authors’ measure unbelievable) being useful to run something like intelligence of a protocol droid from Star Wars. Such things sometimes happen in history books, but it seems there’s been enough for the last few decades, and not that often.
My opinion is that it’s in between as typical, they are just talking about public Internet becoming more toxic in the sense of security than before.
That was honestly expected to happen at some point anyway. My another opinion is that offline-p2p things like Briar are like half of the future, while that unsafe public Internet will become more similar to TV and radio and more conformist and similar and uninteresting.
My gut tells me that the recent “scary AI” news coming from the AI companies is actually somewhere in-between altruistic intent and pure evil greed; I just don’t have enough information to grasp the real motivation.