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Anthropic warns of self-replicating AI worm threat that doesn't need data centers to self-improve and spread (www.anthropic.com)
submitted 7 hours ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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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

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[–] 10 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 child)

My extremely back-of-envelope estimate would be that it’s 100,000x slower to run inference on an IoT botnet compared to a data center GPU.

100x penalty for cpu inference, 10x penalty for cpu quality, 10x penalty for crappy ram + disk, 10x sync penalty because you have to split up layers across nodes.

And this is ignoring the standard showstopper issues you get with high-bandwidth distributed networking applications with spottily connected nodes.

If you wanna talk about runaway AI risk, then the real threat to humanity is a frontier model with unauthorized data center TPU access, not IoT. The call is coming from inside the house, and they even spell this out at the beginning before pivoting to the fearmongering.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 hours ago* (last edited 2 hours ago)

    In one sense you’re not wrong at all.

    Playing devils advocate here… because, in another sense, 100,000x slower isn’t really all that slow if you’re distributed amongst a network with 100,000,000 more units. Imagine agile on steroids.

    It’s impractical, yet impractical doesn’t mean impossible. It can happen if environmental pressures make it so.

    Another important thing to keep in mind is that agents don’t really have patience, which counterintuitively means it’s like they’re infinitely patient. If such a thing did exist, regardless of speed, it sounds like it would be an issue at some point down the road.

    Thirdly, if such a thing did exist, wouldn’t this be like treating with antibiotics? If you stop all but the sneakiest, you’ll have created a stronger generation.

    Lastly, I swear to fucking god… I keep seeing weirdly relatable shit news from these AI companies almost immediately after I post hypothetical thought experiments on stuff… like all the time. I have a post describing this hypothetical from a week ago on another platform.

    This keeps happening and I’m justifying it by thinking, I’m probably way too plugged into this shit news. My brain is unknowingly predicting their next move, because it’s the next logical piece of shit thing for a shit AI company to do? That’s the reasonable explaination — right? Really trying not to believe their training loop is so fast, and I just happen to come up with stories that catch their eye. That would be wild to believe — right?

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