betterunix2
Really it sounds like this is a disagreement about what it means for a market to be "regulated" -- I draw the line at compliance, you seem to draw the line elsewhere.
(That is basically the argument for OCR in the postal system -- it does make mistakes but it makes fewer mistakes than human beings.)
Also speculators serve an important purpose: hedging strategies require speculators on the other side. It is not just a "certain clientele," there are people who run profitable businesses on speculation (it amounts to collecting insurance premiums from people who want hedges).
One reason to maintain an ICBM force is that the ICBM silos protect the missiles against anything less than a direct nuclear strike; by placing the silos far from urban areas you force the opponent to expend many nuclear weapons attacking individual silos, which greatly increases the cost of a first strike. If you were wondering where bomber forces fit in, maintaining both ICBM and bomber forces creates a "synchronization problem" -- both must be destroyed at the same time to prevent retaliation, and by strategically placing the air fields and missile silos a country can make a synchronized attack more difficult (the attack will be detected long before anything is destroyed, but one of the two will have more time to initiate the retaliatory strike). Bombers also force the opponent to expend significant resources on air defense, resources that could otherwise be devoted to offensive weapons. Another reason to have a bomber force is that bombers can be recalled after being ordered to strike; missiles cannot be recalled once launched and even if they could be the other side will detect the launches and immediately retaliate.
The US and USSR developed an entire theory of the nuclear triad during the cold war, and both reached the same basic conclusions about the need for all three legs.
The basic launch sequence is this: a missile crew receives a series of characters and both missileers write the characters down. They check against a codebook and verify that they both heard the same message and that it is a valid launch order. If the message is valid, they unlock the launch keys (from a box secured by two combination locks, each missileer knows the combination for one lock), insert the keys, enter the missile launch unlock code, enter the warhead arming code, turn the keys, and then that's that.
(There are several other steps -- go watch a video of a test launch and listen to the operators read off the checklist, there are quite a few steps. If you are wondering why such information is public, it is meant to reassure the other side that there is no possibility of unauthorized or unintentional launches -- we want our adversaries to know how we control our nuclear forces so they don't panic and preemptively attack us)
Basically, you would run out of water, and even if you have clean water you would still run out of food, even if you survived the strike and the fallout. We cannot actually live without major transportation hubs to deliver food etc., which by necessity are located in or near the major urban areas that would be destroyed in a nuclear war. That, more than anything else, is why the US and USSR ultimately abandoned "civil defense" and focused on "deterrence."
(China is interesting because strictly speaking they follow a theoretically suboptimal strategy -- they keep their ICBMs in an unarmed configuration and would "absorb the blow" of a surprise nuclear first strike. The US and RF follow the theoretically optimal "launch on warning" strategy, which requires ICBMs that are always armed and ready to launch within minutes.)
I do not have much faith in what they believe about their ability to enforce a security boundary given their track record so far, not to mention their grossly inflated sense of importance (both about their work and about themselves).
I connect a computer to the Internet and then leave a program running on it, unattended, that connects to a bunch of websites and does things that "exceed my authorized access." Then I say "Oh sorry about that, I was running this really important experiment, really it's gonna change the world in ways we cannot even imagine! I'll totally be more careful about this sort of thing!" I tweak the arguments and try again, it does something else that "exceeds my authorized access," and then I say, "OK this time I am definitely putting some hardcore controls in place. I'm running it in the SELinux sandbox now! It still needs Internet access because I want to check in on my experiment from this awesome cafe down the street..."
Oh wait we know exactly how that scenario ends: I get prosecuted for CFAA violations and gross negligence, and probably several other crimes, and that is where those prison guards you mentioned enter the picture.
> Similarly models could allocate a dead zone of their weights to inter agent communication
Sure, and you know what? If we cannot know that these models are not doing such things, let them stay in the airgapped environment and let the researchers continue their experiments and research work there until they develop techniques to verify that their models work as intended without unintentionally doing harmful things. The issue here is not agents designing covert channels, it is agents doing things that are almost certainly illegal and which have the potential to cause actual harm in ways that are not at all difficult to imagine. There is a reliable, robust, and straightforward solution, which OpenAI is claiming they cannot possibly implement because it would mean...putting in some effort and accepting some inconvenience. We would not accept that excuse from anyone else; why should we accept it here?
A leased line would be an acceptable way to do this, given that the endpoints do not really have any way directly to interact with the service provider network. It is not as though this is some uniquely difficult problem, it is just a question of putting in the effort.
> the hosts themselves were not connected to the internet. But a service they were using was
So they were physically connected to the Internet -- via the service they were using.
...so stop scattering things across many data centers.
> iteration speeds
Which can be slowed down for the sake of not breaking the law.
> it likely needs to happen on a daily basis or multiple times a day.
Keep it inside the airgap until you are ready to move the model into production. What's the problem here?
I fail to see the problem.
> Software must receive updates
Which can be delivered by physical media as needed, and which is basically irrelevant in the context of experiments.
> there must be some kind of result that feeds into the development of new models.
All of which can remain on the airgapped network until they are ready for an actual release. What's the problem here?
Seriously, if these systems are so good at finding exploits, why not just run these experiments on machines and networks that are not physically connected to the Internet? That seems obvious, robust, and simple. They would have to set up their own web servers etc., but they claim to already be doing so within their software-secured environment anyway so I fail to see the problem.
It's what the military does, and they use color-coded cables to avoid accidental interconnections between classified and unclassified networks. Maybe someone working at a frontier lab can explain why this is not the first choice?
As I said in my previous comment, the homicide rate is not the same as the rate at which murderers are convicted and imprisoned. Besides having a higher homicide rate compared with other countries, the US also has a low rate of arrests/convictions for homicide compared to other countries:
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2022/01/12/as-murders-spi...
Really though, the fact that a majority of US inmates are non-violent offenders should be enough to tell you that the homicide rate says little about the incarceration rate. The homicide rate also says very little about the overall crime rate, unless you believe in antiquated concepts about "criminality" that treat "crime" as a monolithic category. In reality, a murderer is no more likely to commit fraud or possess drugs than anyone else, and someone kiting checks is no more likely to be a murderer.
Pretty inconvenient with the Internet being a thing.