I think it's become a bit of a cliche/clique'y thing amongst a certain population. I don't know its origins (tumblr emo crowd??) but I first encountered it in Silicon Valley. The Collison brothers used to love doing it, as did Altman. I feel it projects a kind of stream-of-thought with an aloofness, like "i dont care enough for correct form. language bends to my unique thoughts. read this if you like, i dont care lol".
All-lowercase comes accross as the text equivalent of a hoodie and jeans: comfortable, a bit defensive against being seen as trying too hard, and now so common it barely reads as rebellion.
As I understand it the root was people using the iPhone with autocorrect turned off. That’s how someone from the tumblr emo crowd (where it was definitely prevalent!) explained it to me, and the reason was because there was a lot of culture specific terminology used (including deliberate misspellings of words) that was difficult if autocorrect was switched on.
By extension you can see how that could also apply to tech.
The prompts aren't the key to the attack, though. They were able to get around guardrails with task decomposition.
There is no way for the AI system to verify whether you are white hat or black hat when you are doing pen-testing if the only task is to pen-test. Since this is not part of a "broader attack" (in the context), there is no "threat".
I don't see how this can be avoided, given that there are legitime uses to every step of this in creating defenses to novel attacks.
Yes, all of this can be done with code and humans as well - but it is the scale and the speed that becomes problematic. It can adjust in real-time to individual targets and does not need as much human intervention / tailoring.
Is this obvious? Yes - but it seems they are trying to raise awareness of an actual use of this in the wild and get people discussing it.
I agree that there will be no single call or inference that presents malice. But I feel like they could still share general patterns of orchestration (latencies, concurrencies, general cadences and parallelization of attacks, prompts used to granulaize work, whether prompts themselves have been generated in previous calls to Claude). There's a bunch of more specific telltales they could have alluded to. I think it's likely they're being obscure because they don't want to empower bad actors, but that's not really how the cybersecurity industry likes to operates. Maybe Anthropic believes this entire AI thing is a brand new security regime and so believe existing resiliences are moot. That we should all follow blindly as they lead the fight. Their narrative is confusing. Are they being actually transparent or transparency-"coded"?
I agree so much with this. And am so sick of AI labs, who genuinely do have access to some really great engineers, putting stuff out that just doesn't pass the smell test. GPT-5's system card was pathetic. Big-talk of Microsoft doing red-teaming in ill-specified ways, entirely unreproducable. All the labs are "pro-research" but they again-and-again release whitepapers and pump headlines without producing the code and data alongside their claims. This just feeds into the shill-cycle of journalists doing 'research' and finding 'shocking thing AI told me today' and somehow being immune to the normal expectations of burden-of-proof.
Microsoft’s quantum lab also made ridiculous claims this year, with no updates or retractions after they were mocked by the community and some even claimed fraud
Yeh I still don't think there's a fixed definition of what a world model is or in what modality it will emerge. I'm unconvinced it will emerge as a satisfying 3d game-like first-person walkthrough.
To this day I hate captchas. Back when it was genuinely helping to improve OCR for old books, I loved that in the same way I loved folding@home, but now I just see these widgets as a fundamentally exclusionary and ableist blocker. People with cognitive, sight, motor, (and many other) impairments are at a severe disadvantage (and no, audio isn't a remedy, it is just shifting to other ableisms). You can add as many aria labels as you like but if you're relying on captchas, you are not accessible. It really upsets me that these are now increasing in popularity. They are not the solution. I don't know what is, but this aint it.
In a vacuum you would be right. However, such a skewed distribution is virtually guaranteed to be biased and expose you only to a very small sample of the ideas and experiences of humanity. It's not even a matter of the "ideas" being "bad", but rather being only a tiny sliver of the world.
Well, my point is that you don't actually know how diverse the authors are. It was just assumed by their identity. They could be immigrants. They could have been abused as children, or hungry. They could have been raised by wealthy tennis pros. They could have spent their lives hacking on electronics and playing chess, or they could have spent their lives camping and herding cattle. You have no idea. And this is true of someone from any part of the world.
Your ideas are shaped in large part by your identity, which includes your socio-economical background, race, gender, sexual proclivity, country, and on and on.
When you are only exposed to ideas from the same homogeneous group, your view of our heterogeneous world becomes deeply flawed. Diversity of identity is paramount for a diversity of ideas.
>Diversity of identity is paramount for a diversity of ideas.
I don't think we really need a proliferation of diverse ideas. Put 10 people in a locked room with 10 different ideas, and you're probably going to find them arguing, not out, in a few hours.
Don't get me wrong being stuck after 1 idea is bad, but I don't feel that's where we are today.
If you want to learn “how to survive in a tough world”, the worst strategy you could follow is to to only read ideas from the group which dominates much of it. By your logic, you should be reading books specifically from people who face constant hardship and discrimination, which includes trans, homosexual, black people… Sure, throw in a few books from rich white men in the global north to learn how they think, but to only read from them would be a mistake.
Even if you don’t want diversity of ideas, you need it to form an accurate picture of reality.
- Thinking in Systems - by Donella Meadows
- Dead Aid - Dambisa Moyo
- Day of Empire - Amy Chua
- Mistakes Were Made (not by me) - Caroll Tavris
- Brotopia - Emily Chang
You seem to be arguing as if those are unambiguously positive traits. They’re not. The biggest societal problems we face are caused by people with too much money and power who always thirst for more.
One of the reasons to read books is to expose yourself to other perspectives. Reading 25 books from exactly the same group of people is just a waste compared to reading a diverse selection of books. You should read some books from the rich, power and ambitious. You should also read books from other people.
I help run an eval platform and thought it fun to try a bunch of models on this challenge [1].
There's some fun little ones in there. I've not idea what Llama 405B is doing. Qwen 30B A3B is the only one that cutely starts on the landscaping and background. Mistral Large & Nemo are just convinced that front shot is better than portrait. Also interesting to observe varying temperatures.
I feel like this SVG challenge is a pretty good threshold to meet before we start to get too impressed by ARC AGI wins.
> I feel like this SVG challenge is a pretty good threshold to meet before we start to get too impressed by ARC AGI wins.
It's a very bad threshold. The models write the plain SVG without looking at the final image. Humans would be awful at it and you would mistakenly conclude that they aren't general intelligences.
I dunno. A competent human can hold the a mental image and work through it. Not too hard with experience. What I generally mean tho is: I don't think we can state the supreme capabilities of AI (which people love to do with grate fervour and rhetoric) until they can at the very least draw basic objects in well-known declarative languages. And while it may be unwise to judge an AI based on its ability to count the number of 'R' letters in various words, it -- amongst a wider suite ofc -- remains a good minimum threshold of capability.
All-lowercase comes accross as the text equivalent of a hoodie and jeans: comfortable, a bit defensive against being seen as trying too hard, and now so common it barely reads as rebellion.