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The government seems like it's in a rough spot. If they let Mythos out, they seem worried people could use it to mass-hack the internet. China seems to not care

The government seems like it's in a rough spot. If they let Mythos out, they seem worried people could use it to mass-hack the internet. China seems to not care so much about this and they're right behind. I don't really know what the answer is.

dannyw 24d ago
I wonder how much of it is fears over "mass-hacking the internet", and how much of it is fears over the model discovering various NSA/CIA/etc "tailored access operations", and other deliberate side-channels / vulnerabilities / etc? (Or perhaps vulns that NSA/etc discovered and has been keeping it private; as they're known to do). I feel there's a lot that's unaccounted for, and the whole "AWS team reports a 'jailbreak' that is just 'review this codebase'" story doesn't add up. I wonder if there were some parallel construction going on, and if at the same time, the NSA started losing the exploits they had because it was getting patched.
- Revanche1367 24d ago
  I think the latter is likely their primary concern. Certain models making hackers more effective doesn’t change that black hat hacking will still be illegal and that’s always been the prime deterrent against capable hackers. While there is some fallout likely with much more effective hacking being easily accessible, I’m sure govt analysts (unless they were let go) have their own prediction models telling them it’s inevitable that this technology eventually makes it to everyone they don’t want having it, what with China seemingly releasing every progress they make openly. Which makes me think that they’re preparing for that inevitability by hardening the govt systems currently in place and/or by burying the secrets they want to keep hidden deeper underground. Given the history of the US and this particular administration, I feel burying things deeper is a greater priority.
- rustcleaner 24d ago
  One thing is for sure, the USA certainly aren't the good guys anymore (if they ever really were). -t. American
runako 24d ago
Whether or not the government chooses to regulate the space, capricious after-the-fact regulation is the worst of all possible worlds. The ~equivalent models from OpenAI did not get the same treatment (favoritism?), and it's not clear the government has produced even rough guidelines about how to be compliant going forward. Model prep costs far too much money to operate under this kind of regulatory regime.
alightsoul 24d ago
China uses the strategy of letting dangerous technologies loose which causes disruption in the short term but makes people do the right thing like secure their software. The US by comparison gives me the impression of wanting to leave the internet vulnerable by not making Mythos public so that only the US government can use Mythos to gain access to whatever system they like, which is the same thing the pegasus software does
0xbadcafebee 24d ago
The government isn't in a rough spot, they're just idiots. Chinese models already match Mythos in red-teaming. Anyone can use Chinese models any time they want. By holding people back from Mythos they're pushing people to Chinese models. And it worked: Chinese models now make up 70% of OpenRouter tokens (complete inversion from a year ago). Even if Chinese models weren't that great, anyone can fine-tune an open weight model specifically for red-teaming and it'll outperform any other model. So this was always going to happen. A government staffed by logical, sane people would have figured out how not to encourage this, like mobilizing the IT and security industries to secure their products faster, while also cracking down on the "our AI is the most dangerous tool in the world" rhetoric bandied about by the frontier companies. But we don't have that, we have a government of Loony Tunes characters. When you put extremists in office you get extremist behavior.

dannyw 24d ago

I wonder how much of it is fears over "mass-hacking the internet", and how much of it is fears over the model discovering various NSA/CIA/etc "tailored access operations", and other deliberate side-channels / vulnerabilities / etc? (Or perhaps vulns that NSA/etc discovered and has been keeping it private; as they're known to do). I feel there's a lot that's unaccounted for, and the whole "AWS team reports a 'jailbreak' that is just 'review this codebase'" story doesn't add up. I wonder if there were some parallel construction going on, and if at the same time, the NSA started losing the exploits they had because it was getting patched.

Revanche1367 24d ago
I think the latter is likely their primary concern. Certain models making hackers more effective doesn’t change that black hat hacking will still be illegal and that’s always been the prime deterrent against capable hackers. While there is some fallout likely with much more effective hacking being easily accessible, I’m sure govt analysts (unless they were let go) have their own prediction models telling them it’s inevitable that this technology eventually makes it to everyone they don’t want having it, what with China seemingly releasing every progress they make openly. Which makes me think that they’re preparing for that inevitability by hardening the govt systems currently in place and/or by burying the secrets they want to keep hidden deeper underground. Given the history of the US and this particular administration, I feel burying things deeper is a greater priority.
rustcleaner 24d ago
One thing is for sure, the USA certainly aren't the good guys anymore (if they ever really were). -t. American

runako 24d ago

Whether or not the government chooses to regulate the space, capricious after-the-fact regulation is the worst of all possible worlds. The ~equivalent models from OpenAI did not get the same treatment (favoritism?), and it's not clear the government has produced even rough guidelines about how to be compliant going forward. Model prep costs far too much money to operate under this kind of regulatory regime.

alightsoul 24d ago

China uses the strategy of letting dangerous technologies loose which causes disruption in the short term but makes people do the right thing like secure their software. The US by comparison gives me the impression of wanting to leave the internet vulnerable by not making Mythos public so that only the US government can use Mythos to gain access to whatever system they like, which is the same thing the pegasus software does

0xbadcafebee 24d ago

The government isn't in a rough spot, they're just idiots. Chinese models already match Mythos in red-teaming. Anyone can use Chinese models any time they want. By holding people back from Mythos they're pushing people to Chinese models. And it worked: Chinese models now make up 70% of OpenRouter tokens (complete inversion from a year ago). Even if Chinese models weren't that great, anyone can fine-tune an open weight model specifically for red-teaming and it'll outperform any other model. So this was always going to happen. A government staffed by logical, sane people would have figured out how not to encourage this, like mobilizing the IT and security industries to secure their products faster, while also cracking down on the "our AI is the most dangerous tool in the world" rhetoric bandied about by the frontier companies. But we don't have that, we have a government of Loony Tunes characters. When you put extremists in office you get extremist behavior.