> "On June 11th Mark Warner, the vice-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that General Joshua Rudd, who leads the National Security Agency and the Pentagon’s Cyber Command, had told him that Mythos “broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours”"
Why:
1. It's a paraphrase of a 2nd hand conversation and (at least) the last two 'telephone game' recipients are a U.S. Senator and a general, not security domain or IT experts. 2. Motivated communication: The Senator claimed this to justify the necessity of unprecedented restrictions that he agrees with. 3. The original testimony to the Intelligence Committee was almost certainly detailed, nuanced and highly classified, making this an extreme paraphrase.
In saying this, I'm not claiming Mythos may not be a security issue or that something directionally like this wasn't reported. But given the indirect, circuitous path, it's quite easy to imagine the original testimony was more like "Mythos identified a potential vulnerability we rated "Severe" in a critical system and we believe it could find similar vulnerabilities in any of our systems."
State sponsored, non-public penetration fine tunes (of possibly public ones) likely can do it even faster.
Unsupervised penetration RL loop is ideal setup similar to optimization one – it's relatively easy to gain function on it.
And the fact that all our systems are riddled with security holes shouldn't be too much of a surprise given the way that we all know that software is developed and how tech debt / chores are constantly underbudgeted (plus I think this underscores that any one human's knowledge and attention are inherently limited, and even the best PR review is going to leak all kinds of security holes).
- With a weaker model, the time to break into the system might grow so larger that it becomes infeasible, similar to how password hashes can be bruteforced, but if the password is long enough, that is not going to happen in our lifetime.
- There might be problems which are inherently unsolvable with a lower level of intelligence. For example, your dog won't derive calculus from scratch, even if it lived forever.
- LLMs might be biased in such a way that they never explore the entire solution space, no matter how many attempts are made. Some models are notorious for getting stuck in a loop, trying small variations of the same approach every time, even though it is doomed to fail. This can be counteracted somewhat with higher sampling temperature, but that hurts reasoning capabilities.
We're not talking about dogs, but LLM systems.
Mythos is not exploring entire solution space either.
Usually looping is solved by repetition/frequency/presence/n-gram penalties/DRY/min-p sampling, not temperature but we're not talking about small models that have those classes of issues here.
Those "tapes" DOGE took away? Nothing on them can be considered private any more. That's how brute force risk happens. Mythos' risks are showing doorways to exfiltration surely? Why bother when you can walk out the door with a data dump?
The NSA is just a highly specific subclass of the problem. Their traditional publicly stated approach to security is "nothing electronic which enters our domain leaves" and yet somehow they have assessed these systems as capable of breaching their walls? That's super bad.
I suspect they ran an analogue/instance inside their protection rings. I doubt they ran a test outside in the global internet. If they have actually lost control of their boundary, that's a bigger story (which I doubt) and contextually he could have been referring to information systems in NSAs duty of care, not things inside Ft Meade.
“Donald Trump’s blocking of Anthropic is capricious and chaotic” - current title
I don’t understand the posted title quote and assume it’s missing a lot of context or was misinterpreted as it’s a secondary attribution. “Mythos broke into almost all of our classified systems in hours”.
When you put it on those networks already and gave it compute?
In other words, ontologically speaking, post.title -= article.title
I used to treat it as post.title = article.title, but the community taught me by example to cease being a purist.
Anyway article’s flagged so this is just pedantic at this point.
Even if your country prevents access to compute to protect the trillion dollar companies, it’s not going to apply for every country, and as models get better it becomes easier to compete. There’s no way an AI non proliferation treaty will be passed or even enforceable.
> NSA director: 'Mythos "broke into almost all of our classified systems in hours"
> Donald Trump’s blocking of Anthropic is capricious and chaotic
So you either posted the wrong link or are just spreading FUD.
Of course, America is now the only nation on the planet with advanced weaponised AI models that are so good they beat billions of dollars and decades of IT security experience with some of the brightest minds in their fields within hours.
If this were true, you’d see the president yapping and bragging about it on Truth before the NSA director even gets a chance to publicly talk about it. Probably doing a live stream about how he personally prompts his way into an unconditional Iranian surrender. You know it, I know it.
Nice try, William, but unless I see the Senate Intelligence Committee freaking out with you sweating black goo like Giuliani, I ain’t believing it.
This is the same kind of bullshit that was showing a gun on TV that could apparently give people heart attacks with some frozen, untraceable darts.
If the US really was in possession of a technology that could hack into the most secure environments on the planet autonomously within hours, you would see all their partners pulling their access from shared IT systems and blocking all traffic coming from the US immediately.
Especially considering they have been caught spying on allies before:
https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/cover-story-how...
You know what they say in intelligence circles.
Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us twice, it's open windows season.
None of the partners or adversaries seem to give a fuck about Mythos, so there is a good chance this is just another lying NSA director as usual.
Come on, people. You don’t run the NSA if you’re an honest man. It’s a spy agency.
The ability to reproduce an exact copy of hamlet does not make one Shakespeare. A monkey on a typewriter may very well generate Shakespeare eventually, but it wouldn't understand Shakespeare then any more than it could immediately. Likewise a dog may put together some string of text that includes a derivation of calculus, but at no time will it be able to apply that derivation to solve mathematical problems.
It's a line of reasoning meant to shut off empathy to the here and now. And while it sounds good, along the lines of Baywatch: If you're jumping into a live saving situation and you have to choose between further harming your victim and you being harmed, you choose your victim because without you to save both of you, it's fatal; the difference is indirectly or directly pushing your victim into the water then claiming you're altruistically going to save them at a later date.
It's just delusions to keep moving forware.
Third paragraph:
> On June 11th Mark Warner, the vice-chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said that General Joshua Rudd, who leads the National Security Agency and the Pentagon’s Cyber Command, had told him that Mythos “broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours”.
I am not talking about literally bruteforcing passwords (although LLMs are being used for that, too), but bruteforcing passwords and solving verifiable domain tasks have quite a few similarities, especially when considering rule-based and probabilistic bruteforce methods.
> We're not talking about dogs, but LLM systems.
Well, clearly dogs are not LLM systems. It is an analogy. If there is an important point on your mind that makes the analogy break down, feel free to spell it out.
> Mythos is not exploring entire solution space either.
Yes, but weaker models do not find the solution right away, so they need to try more often. But if they only try the same thing every time, they will never succeed, so we need some kind of guarantee that they try something different every time.
> Usually looping is solved by repetition/frequency/presence/n-gram penalties/DRY/min-p sampling, not temperature but we're not talking about small models that have those classes of issues here.
Those might help to reduce looping (at the cost of biasing the generation), but to guarantee that a model can generate all possible generations, we need non-zero probabilities for all tokens, not lower probabilities for likely tokens.
They are? Seems like a much worse way to brute force that a tight loop written in a compiled language.
https://huggingface.co/papers/2306.01545
Although most activity is likely hidden (blackhat or state)