Kolter: AI models contain an unpatchable buffer overflow vulnerability
Zico Kolter · Zico Kolter: OpenAI's Newest Board Member on The Biggest Questions and Concerns in AI Safety | E1197 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Sep 4, 2024 · at 39:51
Zico Kolter, CMU Machine Learning Department Director and OpenAI board member, explains the cybersecurity risks of integrating LLMs into autonomous agents that parse untrusted web data.
0:00 / 0:13exact quote · 13.5s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“This is sort of like these models have a buffer overflow in all of them that we know about, and most importantly, that we don't know how to patch and fix. We don't know how to fix this yet with models”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Zico Kolter
Kolter: LLMs are demonstrably intelligent despite being next-word predictors
“Oftentimes I know people say, oh, well, AI is, it's just predicting words. That's all it's doing. Therefore it can't be intelligent. It can't be. And I think that's just. Demonstrably wrong. What I think is amazing, though, is the scientific fact that when you…”
Kolter: AI model performance is not plateauing in coding tasks
“The domain I use models for most probably is coding, and also doing things like transcribing lectures and stuff like this. On those tasks, I am absolutely not seeing plateauing gains. The latest models, they are notably better than the previous iteration, and …”
Kolter: AI safety should focus on practical risks, not sci-fi doom
“The first is that I think the vast majority of AI safety should not be about these topics. The vast majority should be about quite practical concerns we have on making systems safer, like the kind that I've talked with you about so far.”
Kolter: AI model architectures and Transformers no longer matter
“I, for a lot of my career, was thinking that model architectures really mattered, and by having clever, complex architectures and sub-modules inside architectures, you would have, that was the route to sort of better AI systems. For the most part, I don't beli…”
Kolter: Word prediction intelligence is the top scientific discovery in decades
“You can train word predictors, and they produce intelligent, coherent, long-form responses. This is one of the most notable, if not the most notable, scientific discovery of the past 1020 years. Maybe much longer than that, right?”
Kolter: AI progress faces compute bottlenecks rather than a data shortage crisis
“We are nowhere close to hitting the limits of available data in these models. Arguably, we're unable to process it because we don't have enough compute and things like this, but we're nowhere close to data limits in other senses.”