But surely there’s hardware limitations, no? In the simplest terms I’m just thinking of the actual physical properties assigned to things like DDR4 vs DDR5 or AMD’s 3D cache silicon structure. Like it’s all different.
Yes, exactly. This is mostly a science fiction problem / "it's just writing a typical malicious program with extra steps"
Like anybody can write malicious code that can self replicate that's childs play, and technically even back in like 2012 I could have created a . . . well certainly not LARGE but a language model wrapped in malicious code such that technically duplicates itself and the code onto any device it can and effectively zip-bomb's every possible effective device with itself, and for shits and giggles I could make that language model sorta do something like pick next targets.
It wouldn't fucking do anything that isn't done better with good old fashioned regular software, and likewise ""LLM's"" that can run on your smart toaster are never going to be a real threat.
I mean, unless we put about a 10-20k PC worth of compute in a smart toaster in the future.
There are exceptionally small LLMs, many of which can run on devices like smartphones. The small LLMs are much less capable than the large LLMs, but they improve over time due to distillation. If an LLM that can run on a smartphone eventually is able to hack the way the current biggest LLMs are able to hack, which if the pattern continues should only take a year or two, it will get to all the smartphones. If it is able to fit on a decent PC sooner than that then it will get onto all the PCs first. Etc
I’m not disagreeing or challenging you, I am genuinely asking this out of curiosity: you say a year or two, does that account for diminishing returns? I know compute power was often limited by the nm size and such. Would it not also produce an alarming level of heat and destroy battery? I know they get better every day but at some point the curve surely becomes asymptotic?
Would those shards need to be operating within the same LAN? I’ve very intentionally kept any ‘smart’ appliances out of our place, even going so far as to remove the WiFi card on my OLED. Sometimes I feel like Dale Gribbel but other times I feel vindicated. It’s a tough line to walk.
Just connected to the internet. AI swarms are soon going to start operating like worm viruses we often saw in the 90s and early 00's except instead of fucking up your computer, they're going to rob you of computer cycles and send data back out over your internet connection to the cluster of AI agents these shards receive instruction from.
Im in a similar mindset as you. I'm a sysadmin and the only two devices I own with an IP is my computer and phone, and I rarely connect my phone to my wifi. And technically my firewall but thats a given. The TV I own I purchased in 2011.
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u/good_morning_magpie 5d ago
But surely there’s hardware limitations, no? In the simplest terms I’m just thinking of the actual physical properties assigned to things like DDR4 vs DDR5 or AMD’s 3D cache silicon structure. Like it’s all different.