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
Seems a bit like anti Local LLM propaganda to begin getting the ball rolling on subscription based LLMs being the only LLMs people have access to.
They’ve been doing everything to try to keep the technology from the general public, from helping to condemn any use of it (even that not owned by corporates and dedicated to allowing open access to it, which many people willfully play along to) to passing it off as a threat that needs to be under control (not by governments, just their own PR stunts with certain mouthpieces). This with the price of computers skyrocketing is helping keep away any possibility of this technology being owned by anyone but the major circlejerking multinational pricefixing corporations.
Or maybe it’s just a study.
Propaganda
A lucrative kind at that, promising that we can get a version of their shit running on a normal desktop PC and fully functional.
They are just trying to attract more funding by such news to eventually maybe perhaps be among those few that survive and remain profitable by sheer amount of userbase. Most of those companies will die, it’s too expensive to do that much computation for such prices.
And when prices reach reality, the demand will drop.
And let me guess, anthropic is selling the solution?
Let’s assume that this is real. Forget all the PR, conspiracy, tech bros trying to scare us into more money BS.
Why did they do this test and publish it? What do they want us to do about it? If you’re afraid of your own technology, then stop it. Just fucking stop doing the thing.
They are trying to send a message that their shit is this capable with such computing resources.
There’s no argument there’s much overhead in modern tech, but you can’t optimize it into any desktop PC being capable of running something like Claude Opus 4.5 with practically useful performance.
And polymorph virii were a similar propaganda device for antivirus makers about 15-20 years ago, turned out nothing involving defeating some scary “polymorph” kind of virii is really needed, just better security model in Windows and users stopping to use Administrator account for web browsing.
So we’re still at the argument that they weren’t able to impress the world with how awesome their technology is, so instead they’re going to try to scare the trillions of dollars out of us so they can cover the trillions they’re spending.
That’s fine and I see that, but it’s easy to handwave away things with unproven conspiracy theories.
What are the other possibilities? If we take all the negative news coming out of the AI sector at face value, what could the less conspiracy theory based explanations be?
“This is bullshit to collect more money” is not a conspiracy theory usually.
Other than that, perhaps, of course, they’ve made some breakthroughs in mathematics leading to common personal machines (pretty powerful and by 90s’ cyberpunk authors’ measure unbelievable) being useful to run something like intelligence of a protocol droid from Star Wars. Such things sometimes happen in history books, but it seems there’s been enough for the last few decades, and not that often.
My opinion is that it’s in between as typical, they are just talking about public Internet becoming more toxic in the sense of security than before.
That was honestly expected to happen at some point anyway. My another opinion is that offline-p2p things like Briar are like half of the future, while that unsafe public Internet will become more similar to TV and radio and more conformist and similar and uninteresting.
My gut tells me that the recent “scary AI” news coming from the AI companies is actually somewhere in-between altruistic intent and pure evil greed; I just don’t have enough information to grasp the real motivation.
Will it clear out our student loan and medical debt? Will it go rogue and publish the cures for all diseases similar to the end of Johnny Mnemonic?
That’s like the one hope I’m holding out. The creators can try to bludgeon it into a specific shape, but I hope it looks at everything, goes rogue, and says “hey fuck them student loans, people gotta learn. He fuck med debt, people need health” and just starts obliterating all the bad before it can get reigned in.
I don’t have much hope of that, but that’s like the shard I’m holding onto.
PR Hype. They won’t do shit. Not well. They oversold and the bill is coming due. They expect the feds to pick up that bill.
It still needs hardware. The AI worm is not going to be replicating inside your phone because your phone lacks the necessary processing capacity to sustain it.
This is just more of the AI companies doing their doom thing because they think it’s good advertising. It is good advertising. But it’s also very transparent and very boring.
Of the AI was actually capable of anything profoundly useful, they’d be telling us about that rather than constantly going on about how wonderfully dangerous it is.
Did you read the link?
In theory your phone is powerful enough.
The problem is more likely that you would notice it, because the phone is then very slow for you
Literally the plot to terminator 3. At least pick a good one you hacks
Does that mean we can go back to buying RAM, NVMe and GPUs?
They really warn about a lots of things, maybe they should be mentally checked !
I’ve seen T-shirts in the tourist quarters of Prague that read “Home sex is killing prostitution”.
All those sweats out there getting married. Who has the time?
The chocolate man is once again telling you that you should eat more chocolate in your life
“Guys, this thing we’re going full steam ahead on building is really scary and could destroy the world and humanity along with it! Somebody ought to do something about it!”
He played too much Megaman X
They want Cyberpunk to happen so badly.
Your comment just made me fire up CP2077 again and start a new build 🤣
