This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Mr. Schneier makes a good point here. IT people are used to be confronted with bugs and to deal with them. All the other systems are not.
I have said for years that politics share a lot with coding, and that they should think about adopting methods that have been proven in software development. Like logging all changes of a law in a repository so it can easily be seen who changed what.
They probably don't sell mythos because they can't afford to do so at the same, heavily subsidized cost. They're already burning more money than they generate, and the only way the continue to have cash at all is from fund raising. Selling AI is massively unprofitable. Mythos surely consumes even more resources than Opus, and they probably see that it'll make them go broke even faster than their current trajectory will.
Enjoy your access to this technology before the bigger players do something that “disrupts” your capability to:
We’re on a razor’s edge balanced between dystopia and a sci-fi dream, and we keep getting pushed in the wrong direction by the tech debt and social/economic conventions of the 20th century. We need to tool up while we remain in this transitional phase. It might be very bad later. There’s a chance it might be awesome too. Expect the worst, hope for the best.
Electricity you can expect to always be there, and computers too, they are a staple technology by now, it's like paper. I'm talking personal computers, because with microcontrollers and specialized signal processors and so on nobody even thinks about them.
Food and shelter and medicine - by the measure people had 100 years ago, it'll never be bad in developed countries.
The last point, about discerning truth from fiction, is the important one, because for that purpose things are and are going to be just the same way as they were 100 years ago and 200 years ago and so on back. There have been a few decades when it seemed that we can do that without authoritative chain of proof, from, in case of a criminal investigation, police assembling facts following due process, them being registered and vetted and verified following due process, everything being documented following due process, then court proceedings and so on. Eh, as someone from former USSR, I feel funny typing this. Well, not entirely, for non-political things this was followed very rigorously even there.
So - we've had a timespan of few decades when techno-optimism was misused to erode common respect for due process and following chain of trust in establishing facts.
That's also a problem with mass media, both with freedom of press and press neutrality and ethics and reputation.
We'll have a bit of a rough ride until, very slowly through collective experience, we'll have it as good as before the Internet (the Internet is fine, it's more about people being eager to believe that technology can remove deontological and social and other philosophical components).
As AI is leaned on more and more to patch and defend against vulnerabilities, the value in sneaking back door logic into the models or finding vulnerabilities in the models themselves will increase.
This is one of the reasons for the sharp increase in CI/CD attacks currently; instead of targeting the deployed software, attackers are now targeting the development pipeline where they know there’s minimal human oversight and a lot of security protections are intentionally disabled.
It is the real world Skynet from Terminator universe.
