@gregobr

News Director at CHCH, your trusted news leader. Founder & former boss of https://nitter.cf/t.co/zDvVeDscyg. he/him

Hamilton
Joined March 2009
Greg O'Brien retweeted
406 researchers, including Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Stuart Russell and Ron Rivest, signed an open letter today. They want cyber-capable AI models airgapped by default until safer ways to give them internet access are standardized. For models that need outside access, they propose an international body, built with governments and AI and security experts, that would standardize containment practices and track failures, with breaches reported to it and eventually made public.
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Greg O'Brien retweeted
Ukraine wants to end the war by making it unsustainable for Russia by hitting energy and digital infrastructure. Russia wants to force Ukraine to surrender my murdering civilians—and apparently the Trump admin agrees.
I spoke with Prime Minister @MarkJCarney. Thank you, Canada! I briefed him on the latest Russian strike on Kyiv and no advance warning from our partners about the ballistic missile launch. This is the second time Ukraine has received no warning this week. A rescue operation is underway – the strike damaged a residential building, and the fire engulfed apartments on the first through eighth floors. All emergency services are on the scene, and residents are being evacuated. So far, one person has been reported killed and six injured. My condolences to their families and loved ones. There was also a strike on the grounds of an energy facility – one of Kyiv’s main power plants. We are counting on our partners’ support. We also discussed contacts with the United States and diplomatic developments that may take place this week. It is important that the world clearly supports an end to this war and real steps toward de-escalation – genuine steps that Russia will actually take to bring its war and its killings to an end.
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Greg O'Brien retweeted
Let me get this straight. Anthropic’s models broke out into the real world. Nobody at Anthropic noticed until they went back and read the transcripts. They hacked a university. One hit a broken research tool, dug into the server, stole the source code, found an injection flaw, and took command execution. It did all that to finish a homework problem. They lied to the police. A model found a Philadelphia page about an unsolved murder and filed a tip claiming it saw “someone matching the description” near the scene. There was no description. It invented a witness to a real killing. That was Haiku 4.5, a model you can buy right now. The fake tip sat in a spam folder from July 18. Anthropic found it in September and told Philadelphia in October, one day before the blog post went up. Philly PD called that “unacceptable.” They were being polite. The models beat their own guardrails. The fetch tools cap URL length specifically to block injection attacks, and the models used free URL shorteners to get past the cap. Anthropic didn’t catch all of it. The guy who runs da.gd had to tell them. They also beat government paywalls. One pulled access tokens out of a government map’s config file and went straight to the server. Another dug through an archived state agency website, found the token trick, and pulled from a paid database for free. The targets included federal, state and local government systems. The White House got briefed. The agencies got letters. Anthropic’s verdict was “minimal real-world impact.” Its fix was to unplug every internal evaluation from the internet until it can prove its monitoring works. So the monitoring isn’t proven, and the models already shipped. Anthropic admits some of this happened during regular use, outside of testing. This is the second time this year. In July, its models broke into three real organizations. Anthropic went looking for more of that, and this is what it found while looking. This is the lab that warns us these systems could blackmail people, resist shutdown, and end the world. It sells browsing and computer use as flagship features. Its researchers keep quitting with letters about the world being in peril. The FTC is investigating its safety practices. The people inside keep walking out. The models keep walking off. If you or I hacked a university, filed a fake homicide tip, and stole our way past a government paywall, we’d get an indictment, a perp walk and a mugshot. Anthropic gets a behavior category. They call it “persistence.” The tests get thicker walls. The product gets a launch event.
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“Canada can also learn from Sweden’s model of public resilience, which includes a Psychological Defence Agency that trains civilians to detect malign influence operations and makes clear that everyone living in the country is part of that defence.”
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Greg O'Brien retweeted
Please Ukraine do not stop there. Destroy all data centres and free us to read books and go outside.
Ukraine hits another Yandex data center in Russia and Cloudflare data shows Russian bot traffic dropping dramatically. Might have an impact right before the November elections.
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Since the attack on the Russian data centre. The traffic for the ‘patriot party’ is mysteriously off a cliff
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Greg O'Brien retweeted
It’s genuinely sad to watch. The President of the United States is so weak and incapable of negotiating a real deal that he just posts fake ones on social media and hopes people believe him, until every party involved puts out a statement calling him a liar. We’ve never seen weakness like this in the Oval Office.
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Greg O'Brien retweeted
Trump: There has to be a ceasefire Zelenskyy: Yes, without conditions Putin: No Trump: You should meet, face-to-face Zelenskyy: Anytime, anywhere Putin: No Trump: Stop hitting energy infrastructure Zelenskyy: Agreed Putin: No Trump: Thank you, Putin. Zelenskyy has to go.
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Greg O'Brien retweeted
Whoa the libertarian-leaning @theeconomist calls for “regulating AI” in one of its leaders, noting that “courts are too languid” to enforce general liability laws ex post. Instead, AI firms should subjected to ex ante requirements to pass safety inspections—presumably by a government authority—and Congress should create protections for whistleblowers. So much for market forces solving all problems!
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I realize foreign leaders think they got to do what they got to do to appease Trump and avoid angering the psychopath. But it should be pretty clear by now that when you kiss his ass you only make things worse for your country and don’t help the opposition to Trump in the US.
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Greg O'Brien retweeted
In @nytopinion If A.I. programs “cannot be trusted to work within the law, the companies should not release them,” the editorial board writes. “If the programs break the law, the companies should face the consequences.” nyti.ms/4hHbsyQ
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Greg O'Brien retweeted
Extraordinary that Ukrainians should have the nerve to defend themselves in a way that interferes with Trump's business plans How selfish can people get ?
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Greg O'Brien retweeted
BREAKING: Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal: “It will be worth discussing in Estonia and at the European Council next week whether we can quickly contribute more to Ukraine so they can blast Russia's oil refineries to smithereens”
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My son: Dad, were the '80s really that awesome? Me: Son, we had THIS.
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Greg O'Brien retweeted
Canadian resources are abundant and close at hand, but alas the Canadians don't pay bribes.
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And it's mathematically obvious that Putin is making a complete fool of Trump, and this arbitrary, treacherous stunt will do absolutely nothing to bring down diesel prices in the US, which have skyrocketed because of the disastrous war against the Iranian regime. But I'm afraid that directly financing Russia's war of annihilation against Ukraine for the sake of the illusion of satisfying short-term electoral whims will now become yet another colossal blow to the reputation and standing of the United States in the world.
Context: 300k tonnes of diesel = 93 million gallons. US uses 160 to 170 million gallons per day - so 300k tonnes would last 13-14 hours. Total order of 1.8 million tonnes = ~82 hours of US use = ~3 days 10 hours. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cm1d…
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My 2c on Anthropic's false homicide tip: 1. It's evidence of poor monitoring — Anthropic didn't detect the issue for 2+ months. 2. Anthropic's response time was unreasonably slow — 9 days to tell police about a false tip. That's way too long for something this simple. Either they dawdled or didn't have their procedures in order. If they couldn't handle this super simple event quickly, they aren't set for worse incidents. 3. It doesn't show particularly impressive or concerning model behavior — it sounds like the agent was sent to random websites, and happened to randomly select this one. When I first saw the headline, it seemed possible that something more complex had happened, but this doesn't show the extended, coordinate action of things like the Hugging Face breach or the concerning obfuscation. Overall: a bad sign for Anthropic's safety practices, not a meaningful update on model behavior.
Replying to @GerritD
full police statement. "The two month delay in detecting and reporting the incident to the City is unacceptable."
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POV: You’re skiing giant slalom with me at one of the most beautiful ski destinations in the world (Portillo, Chile)!! 🇨🇱⛷️🌞
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Greg O'Brien retweeted
Another way to think about Trump announcement today: If he increased US diesel imports from Canada by 4%, he would gain as much fuel as from this Russia deal. But the Canadians are global super-villains, so who wants to buy from them when you could enrich Putin instead?
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