Apparently, based on whatever research or paper they were using as their foundation for this statistical model, they could spot the 'virus'. Perhaps it would be in a similar fashion?
I did ask them whether they thought that there might be advances to the point where these behaviors might be able to evade detection knowing the research was out there to 'see' it. They seemed surprised by that question and didn't have any answer.
On the other hand, nothing can be done to fix closed models, nobody knows how they work, how they select the targets for their attacks or the nature of those attacks - even conventional alignment can introduce dangerous cognitive viruses.
The only way to be sure is to have open weights models with fully open abliteration and fine-tuning - both the process and data.
Open weights won't prevent a model from being poisoned because no human understands how the weights actually impact the model.
There's nothing wrong with that logic.
> But as we saw due to AI more and more bugs and exploits are being found, some dating back years of releases.
Well, AI helps fixing bugs too and it can also write bug free code with minimal additional effort, so open source not only retains its advantages in the presence of AI, it multiplies them. After the initial (and artificial) hype and bug-fixing efforts things are going to settle down quite nicely.
Closed source, on the other hand, doesn't have the advantage of multiple eyes and minds finding and fixing bugs and the unavailability of the source isn't an advantage either - AI can decompile and understand binary too, so it can find bugs without access to the sources as well.
> Open weights won't prevent a model from being poisoned because no human understands how the weights actually impact the model.
You're using one-sided logic again. If "no human understands how the weights actually impact the model" then viruses would be impossible. Apparently humans understand enough to introduce viruses and that's enough to detect and remove them. It's similar to alignment and abliteration, as I explained above.
That's by design though. It's just that there's now an exponential increase in the amount of "eyes", in the form of AI agents, looking at the FOSS code to find and fix the bugs.
Academia often produces a lot of complexity. Can not AI simplify this? I don't understand fellow humans anymore. What is meant with a zero-weight virus?
> Importantly, we do not claim in this paper to have created or demonstrated the equivalent of a virus that primarily operates in weight space. However, we have demonstrated the fundamental operations that form the building blocks of both the method of damage and the method of propagation, and evidence that this may take place in weight space – a realm into which we have almost no insight and a dearth of observability tools
> While the cases explored in this paper do not demonstrate self-propagation or actual offensive capabilities, it is abundantly clear that the building blocks are present and operate reliably in frontier models. While these cases by no means directly establish self-propagation, they clearly show the evidence These cases do not demonstrate self-propagation, but show why imperfect editing capabilities can still pose a security risk.
Seems like the authors didn't take the time to review their own use of AI before publishing.
From the body of the paper:
> Importantly, we do not claim in this paper to have created or demonstrated the equivalent of a virus that primarily operates in weight space.
This seems in direct conflict with the HN headline.
> We call this weight space misfolding, by analogy with protein misfolding in prion disease
RIP John McAfee.
On rewatch I think the show should have ended just have the dot com bust. The 'get the band back together and once more into the breech' final theme would have hit harder against that backdrop. After that we'd probably be watching the characters gradually debase their values as technology slowly transformed into a tool of control and oppression and I don't really want to watch that.
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> Importantly, we do not claim in this paper to have created or demonstrated the equivalent of a virus that primarily operates in weight space.