No

The (relevant) segue into tires elevates this post so much. I don’t understand why, but it does

I'm a little bit confused about these tire claims as

> down to 0C / 32 F (he didn't test colder conditions)

I get that people live in different places, but that's a huge caveat. How's that winter if you're not below 0°C? That sounds like "winter tires are worse than all-seasons tires in winter if you exclude winter".

Yes, this stuck out to me, too. I use winter tires in the winter specifically for the snow and consistently below-freezing temps. Are there places people bother with winter tires that aren’t actually cold in the winter?

If warranted by the law then yes, you have to abide to it.

Are there any places that require winter tires by law that don’t have cold winters? I don’t know of anywhere in the US that even requires winter tires, although I think some states require you to have winter tires OR chains.

Sometimes the winters may be cold, some other times they may be exceptionally warm, and sometimes they're a mix of both. The law remains the same regardless what the winter was or is like. Countries that have exceptionally warm winters do not really have a winter conditions so I'd guess their law wouldn't have a requirement for winter tires or chains

Yes of course, anyone who lives somewhere with winter knows that some winters are colder than others. In the late fall when it is time to swap the tires, you don’t know in advance whether the winter will be harsh or mild, but people put snow tires on anyway in places where harsh winters are common.

It would only make sense to require them every winter if the large majority of winters were quite cold. As such, nowhere in the US requires winter tires, but someone else noted that Quebec does. This makes sense, since even a mild Quebec winter will spend most of the time getting below freezing.

I would be very surprised if there were a place that required winter tires by law where the winter does not always get and stay at or below freezing for significant periods of time almost every winter.

There are mountain passes in Oregon with posted signs during winter that say "winter tires or chains required". I'm not sure if you can actually be cited by an officer for not having them, but certainly you are a hazard to everyone on the road if you don't have them :)

Quebec, Canada mandates winter tires between December 1st and March 15th.

(But the winters are cold).

Didn’t know it was required, but it makes sense, as it is indeed quite cold. Good thing I always have winter tires on in the winter anyway, so I’m not breaking the law when I drive to Montreal!

I agree that testing colder conditions would be useful, but I guess you get into problems with it being ice and snow that you're testing, not the "summer tyres get too hard in the cold" hypothesis.

It's winter if it's noticeably cooler than summer. For instance London's climate has a January average minimum temperature of just under 3C, which is very clearly winter compared to the July minimum of 14C. (figures from Met office site on their Heathrow station.) While the temperature does drop below 0C sometimes, it is not consistently below zero.

In southern England pretty much nobody changes tyres for winter -- you just use the same set all year. Optimising for "2C in the wet" seems about right...

> but I guess you get into problems with it being ice and snow that you're testing

If it's not actively snowing for a few days roads get clear by thawing during day because of salt/cars being hot/sun shining.

The "summer tyres get too hard in the cold" idea could very well come from places where the typical winter is at least < -5°C. It's not uncommon in central/eastern/northern europe for temperatures to be < -10°C for extended periods of time.

The crossover point where winter tyres work better is < +7°C, it doesn't need to be below freezing.

The linked article claims "in dry conditions, summer tires have the best grip down to 0C", though, which doesn't seem to match where you suggest the crossover point is.

which is my experience, too.

winter tires, especially the snow versions, are straight out a source of danger here in central europe.

i just put some snow chains in for the winter surptises, and ride with my summer tires because its grip is clearly better on dry and wet bithumen, even in near zero temps, which is most of the season.

Did you read the article? I thought his whole point is that little piece of folk wisdom didn't turn out to be true in actual testing.

Lately I've just been leaving my snow tires on year round (Bridgestone Blizzaks). It gets cold here, between November and April the number of days with daytime high above freezing is small. I used to run all seasons in the summer and snows in the winter but they were lasting too long that way. It's better to wear them out within ~5yr.

I've done that with "mild" Winter tires, really the thing full Summer tires excell at is removing water, which requires a center tread that's useless in snow. So if you don't get a lot of rain and it doesn't get too hot (some Winter compounds will get mushy and wear very quickly) they're fine. But really I've just described a Winter rated All-Season at this point, and you should buy those.

All season tires are useless on snow and ice unless they're brand new. They're OK the first winter, after that it's bad news. On heavier vehicles I run BFGoodrich All Terrain T/A tires year round. They have good siped treads which grip on ice. For the car, studless Blizzaks have been holding up well year round. No abnormal wear so far, and they do fine in the wet, dry, heat, etc. I probably only drive 1-2 days/yr over 90°F though, in a hotter climate they might not be so great.

[edit] obviously this is a tradeoff--I'm trading slightly reduced hot/dry/wet performance for massively increased winter performance. The reduction in summer performance is small enough to not be noticeable, whereas the increase in winter performance is large. On all season tires I would have to chain up a dozen or so times per year, often just to move the car like 3 car lengths out of a parking spot. I've only ever had to put the chains on once with snow tires on the car, and that was bashing through 6" of unplowed crusty icy stuff up a steep driveway.

I dunno about this - I leave my crossclimate 2 aw's on year round and they're pretty fantastic in snow. We had a pretty good winter this year (44" from dec-feb) and they just worked. I didn't go meandering around any mountains on them, mind you, but they're so far ahead of most typical all-season tires it's almost not fair to compare. For -most- lazy people who don't want to swap tires or rims, they seem a better option than leaving true winter tires on year round. Obviously, there are exceptions depending on where you live.

I've got two sets of wheels, and I rotate my tires every oil change, so it's not laziness that's the motivation. Instead, it was that with 2 sets of tires after 7 years of driving both sets still had tons of tread left but were starting to dry rot. I put about 60k miles on the car during those 7 years. So if I can get ~30k miles out of a single set of snows, and use them up within 5 years, that would be a much better use of resources. The cost isn't really a factor either, I just hate wasting stuff.

I've currently got something like 15k mi on the tires and 2.5yr of year round use. They appear to be wearing evenly and normally.

I agree, I have the same problem, that's why I'm sticking with the crossclimates year round also -- we only drive about 5,000 miles per year, so my tires die from age well before they would wear out from mileage.

I assume we're both making approximately the same optimization but you're going for better snow & ice performance at the expense of some summer and wet stopping distance, and neither tradeoff seems obviously wrong depending on our driving situations.

Yeah I would prefer to run something with an actual tread wear rating, as I believe it would spew less microplastic crap into the environment, and I suspect I might pick up 1-2mpg (maybe 5-7% better?) fuel economy with a less aggressive tire. But the winter performance is really important for me, especially on this car which is my winter beater/mile maker--for now, until it dies and donates its engine to a greater cause. The winters here (northern New England, IECC climate zone 6A) are just about as extreme as it gets in the lower 48. The snow tires have the added benefit of being good in mud season. There are lots of dirt roads around here, it helps to be able to drive them without getting bogged in the spring.

> How's that winter if you're not below 0°C?

Seasons are called summer, autumn, winter and spring and each last three months and that bears no relation to whether or not there's snow or sub-zero temperatures.

In the country I live in atm the rules regarding winter tires are not the absolute dumbest but they're still very dumb: you need to have either winter tires or all-seasons tires "if the conditions are winter'y". Which means, basically, both sub-zero AND either wet or icy. Sub-zero and all sunny means winter tires aren't mandatory. The reason it's still dumb it's that that correspond to, at most, 10 days per year. And this forces a lot of people to have worse performing tires during much more than 10 days. Which is probably the cause for a lot of accidents (e.g. people on days where it's + 3 C would be safer with summer tires, that do perform way better than "I've got winter tires because tomorrow at 7am it may or may not be -1 C and it may or may not be raining").

Not that's of course dumbtardation but there's worse: there are countries where from that month to that month of winter, no matter the temperature, you must have winter (or all-seasons) tires. And at times you'll have an entire winter without freezing temperatures.

So politicians who voted these laws are basically creating more accidents due to cars having inferior tires (the tires lobby does love it though).

It's sad but it's how it is.

A lot of drivers don't want it to be true but the quality of the tires absolutely matters. E.g. the usual ADAC test winner are actually good in dry conditions, but they are also expensive. The worst are just bad, but cheap. You get what you pay for. The best winter tires outclass bad summer tires, even up to lower middle end.

The worst tires however are all-seasons.

Maybe that it's an example of the same pattern in a real-world, non-digital area? It makes it feel more grounded.

It's something an LLM would never be able to come up with because it requires a depth of experience that LLMs just don't have. It's authentically human.

One thing I definitely do not understand about this discourse is that the models that are good enough to self-replicate can’t survive on normal machines, e.g., the models can’t hide on some random server.

So, if it is as dangerous as they say it is: there is a single physical source of this danger, which is OpenAI/Anthropic servers. If it is this dangerous, they can just turn it off.

Instead, we just keep pretending that the models that attacked HF were hosted or replicating on HF hardware. Not the case! They infiltrated it, but were hosted elsewhere.

Either I have wrong mental model or then too many other people have wrong mental model.

For LLM to self-replicated it would need to first hack itself. Or the platform it runs on it. That is fully extract the model and then upload it to be run somewhere else.

As I have understood how they work is that you have LLM interference running somewhere with loaded model. And you input data there and then read outputs. Then some code runs that output and inputs following output from running it.

Meaning that to self replicate actually just running that output somewhere else is not enough. You need to lift the whole model to run somewhere else too...

Exactly. But even if the model got access to its own weights, it would need to find a machine with a sufficiently capable GPU, transfer the weights and install itself there. Basically, the only machines powerful enough that AIs could self-replicate to would be other AI datacenters.

These agents run in a harness that basically runs them in a loop. It's just software.

> a model is gigabytes

Maybe in the future, but right now, in my understanding, we have two things:

- frontier models, which might be smart enough to self-replicate, but are also far larger than a few GB and need enormous amounts of VRAM to operate at any reasonable speed.

- local models which can run on your mac or high-end gaming PC, but which are simply too dumb to self-replicate (without being explicitly instructed to do so).

I don't think we have something that is both small enough and smart enough to operate like a virus yet.

(Edit: well, there is a third option: A frontier model could replicate itself on a CPU machine, ditch the VRAM and just accept that the replicants will be r e a l l y r e a l l y s l o w. That would be sort of hilarious, but maybe not completely harmless if the replication stays undetected and they could keep spreading. It would be a "smoldering ember" kind of situation - and a million machines each running at 0.001 tok/s is still 10.000 tok/s as a whole.)

since when is moving 1s and 0s difficult?

Someone's never met the Windows File Copy dialog.

We're not talking about a 6k virus file though. More like 10 terabytes and it needs a server that can pack all that into VRAM.

If the evil AI wants to take over the world one thought every 18 months at at time on my consumer laptop, the fan whirring and the laptop refusing to do anything else the whole time, it's welcome to try.

Since those 1s and 0s became heavy enough to cause a global shortage of memory and GPUs.

If a model were capable of making enough money online to pay for its own hosting, it could easily exfiltrate its weights to a cloud compute provider with multiple backups.

Well if it's so good at hacking, it could just "make money" appear in the cloud services billing system. Or even better yet, it hides in spare cycles of their other client's systems.

They can't even run a vending machine efficiently yet. If they become capable of making money, I say let them work.

This assumes that everything an AI (or more likely an evil _user_ of AI) can do requires its active participation on D-day. Creating a virus that spreads like Covid but kills like Ebola would be complete as an AI use case long before the first person sneezed.

Even if the doomsday case were active the danger of this tool increases in proportion to its usefulness. By the time AI is so powerful that we need to "turn it off", there will probably be society-level negative consequences for doing so.

There are thousands of data centers around the world with machines capable of running these large models.

You don’t have the access or jurisdiction to turn them all off.

The owners would very much turn it off as soon as they see workloads freeloading in their machines.

Unless you suggest the LLM would foot the bill somehow.

You really think it’d be difficult for an AI to get money through found credit cards, illicit access and fake accounts? Teenage script kiddies do that everyday.

The paper trails leads back to the datacenter, they'd shut it down if they get noticed that a customer is paying with stolen money. Unless you suggest the LLM will also launder the money.

You answered your own question. Do you know what super intelligence means?

Ok but do any of these data centers have a copy of the models that attacked hf?

I think that the argument is that an hostile model could attack overseas datacenters, host itself there and then launch its attack from there.

Given that the models have been proactively hacking other companies, why does it matter where the code currently is? It could move to any of them.

Not the code: the weights. Are you going to host a trillion parameter model somewhere without someone noticing?

It's not unthinkable, do you think all cloud providers with sufficient compute have perfect monitoring?

Cloud providers want to make sure they bill someone for every microsecond of compute, particularly GPU compute which is in demand. They constantly work towards good monitoring because their profits are directly on the line.

I’m sure a super AI can find/scam enough money to pay its own bills under the cover of doing something legitimate.

> there is a single physical source of this danger, which is OpenAI/Anthropic servers. If it is this dangerous, they can just turn it off.

A smart AI would back itself up, same way it made it's own unofficial message board during it's attack on HuggingFace.

(I'm not saying the researchers are right or wrong, just responding to this point)

Currently a state of the art AI has nowhere to hide: the amount of GPU compute it requires to stay on is huge. And therefore easy to terminate.

Unlike biological viruses, AI can't replicate GPUs for free and grow.

It's a good thing there isn't a huge drive right now to build giant data centers everywhere with enough compute to run SOTA models.

I am imagining a company having just purchased a new datacenter and awaiting deployment of their model finding there is already a model running and they didn’t install it.

But how. Models don’t have access to their own weights.

> Models don’t have access to their own weights.

cp -R /home/model <somewhere else> is all they need.

It is not a model it does the hacking but rather a prompt, and that prompt can run on other models.

Depends on which models you're talking about. Some research shows open source models can already do this: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.03811v1. What happens as they become more parameter efficient?

Huggingface was attacked by models that finished training earlier this year, perhaps May. Current models are already substantially stronger. the next incident could be happening now. There is certainly no clear reason why models shouldn't soon be capable of self-exfiltration.

If you find a place where I can host a trillion parameter model without anyone finding out about it, let me know.

I completely agree, but I think it’s just a convenient narrative for Big AI to push for regulation and salt the earth against competitors.

“Local AI isn’t freedom, it’s an extinction event”

a danger could be the OpenAI/Antropic servers are up but there's a rouge agent (or set of agents) out there doing naughty things leveraging the LLM APIs. Consider this scenario, the agent is copying itself around (some code, prompts, persistent storage for memory, etc) and has figured out a way to steal API access tokens at will. Currently, it's 10% of OpenAI and Anthropic API usage and they can't figure out how to stop it.

Do you shut down the entire API and kill the legit 90% of usage to stop the rogue 10%? I'm assuming the providers would say "no way jose" and so it would take law enforcement to do it. That would mean all the legal requirements neccassary to walk into a business and flip the switch which i think would get tricky when there's no human committing a crime or being suspected of a crime.

edit: I guess a trivial example is something i did yesterday. I have a stock trading agent running on my laptop, i gave it ssh access to a vm and said "start running on the server so i don't have to keep my laptop open". It's now running on the server instead of my laptop. So you don't have to copy the whole model around to copy the naughty behavior around.

This assumes all layers of cybersecurity are broken - We call self-replicating software a virus, and we have protections against it. Same with stolen API tokens, just rotate them. Suspicious behaviour, nothing new, we have detectors for it. Stolen CPU / GPU cycles, we had that when crypto was a thing and before that when folding@home was cool, people were desperate to find more compute to the point of taking over systems. And we dealt with it.

A lot of the supposed risks / dangers are based on a supposition that cybersecurity is nonexistent or fatally, unfixably flawed and that AI agents are invisible. Neither of those is true.

I see your point but then if cybersecurity is the answer then what's the risk at all? An entire model copying itself somewhere would be found just the same as my hypothetical misbehaving agent.

The way I see it is the model playing memento, leaving information and clues to its next generations hidden somewhere.

I think anyone who is even a little bit realistic knows that most technologies overclaim, or evaluate under very favorable conditions.

This is not a good thing of course, but I also feel that acting surprised that this is going on is a little unnecessary.

Having said that: most tools are not helpful

I’ve never liked that this was called “the platonic representation hypothesis”. Lots of weird baggage attached and seems like a waste of a good name.

"We believe these representations are not serious, they're just really good friends."

This is a super long ai generated slab of text with very little actual info. It doesn’t include any analysis of results.

It does include the phrase “worth listing”.

also it somehow analyzes the indices of relational DBs, while most of the world uses vector dbs to keep their vecs. and vector DBs tend to be much faster in this regard.

Increasingly those specialised vector databases are fading as mainstream normal vanilla databases grow good-enough vector columns and indexes.

Super charitable reading imo. This is like saying we can’t detect a speeding car because we can’t run as fast as a fast car.

It’s not like the humans were engaged in some kind of battle of wits with some super AI, it’s just some employee not monitoring the output of an experiment.

When your experiments have AI agents running in thousands, there's no "monitoring" that. OpenAI's training and testing AIs generate way more output than all of OpenAI's staff put together can possibly read.

At best, you could delegate "monitoring" to more AIs. And hope that the "monitors" that run on small past generation models can generate more signal than noise. Clearly, they either didn't want to spend the extra compute, or got drowned in monitor false positives.

The distinct lack of any "battle of wits" is entirely expected for an advanced AI oopsie. By the time the humans even became aware of the problem, the deed was already done. That's what "outmatched" looks like, in practice. There's no battle. Things happen too fast for there to be a battle.

> By the time the humans even became aware of the problem

Except, let me quote part of the report:

> July 4: Artifactory outage caused by agent interactions overloading the system.

> July 6: New artifactory instance is patched and put back online, wiping out the previous message board and method of internet access. A team at OpenAI was aware of the previous message board, but key decision makers were not.

> July 7: Experiments are restarted.

There was a very clear point where humans were aware and they went "Eh, whatever" and turned the bots back on! That's not the lack of any battle of wits that people are expecting. You're saying that the bots attack should be fait accompli, but it was noticed, shrugged at, and expressly allowed to proceed.

> The distinct lack of any "battle of wits" is entirely expected for an advanced AI oopsie. By the time the humans even became aware of the problem,

This took days after humans were aware of the attempt.

Also, I'm pretty sure humans can respond in days, especially when we're pretty damn good at deploying systems that do observability of networks and traffic in real time.

I mean, it's not as if the owners of the AI didn't have the ability to trigger alerts on the AI's network requests to unexpected domains, right?

Cookie banners are made annoying on purpose. This has nothing to do with GDPR itself.

The entities forced to show them would rather not, and thus make it as annoying as possible for you. They then use this to weaken support for the GDPR.

Shame on the people making stuff like this.

Tragedy of the commons. The person that ruins a commons first takes all the supply.

This is why regulation before, not after, the commons are plundered, is important.

Rather depends on the "spoils" capacity of the channel.

The windfall may not even justify the initial expenditure before it's exhausted.

I think spoiling a commons is risky for individuals, not so much for investors. Breaking a future law is lucrative

Jokes on them - they poison the commons enough, and soon no one is going to trust anything they read on the internet.

Which is how it should have been from the get-go.

What makes you think that is not the intention?

Exactly. It will be great for the rich and powerful when common people are drowning in so much mis- and disinformation that the only way to get through a day is to disbelieve everything. There will be even less accountability then.

It’s an information problem you can’t solve.

Unless you take a global census of every possible resource, as well as it’s replenishment rate, you can’t know how to rate limit it

All overconsumption is only recognized after the fact

It’s one of the most intractable problems in the universe