IT is extremely easy to just accuse these kids of being moral reprobates, recognize how they are harming themselves by cheating, and move on.

But this attitude fails to recognize that this is a perfectly predictable consequence of the education they have received up to this point. The standard to which they have been held has rewarded AI use and actively punished individual effort (not only is it a big sacrifice to put forth the effort, but the few mistakes one DOES make still count against them, whereas the next student over gets a higher grade for just using AI for the whole thing).

These students behave in this way because we taught them to. Our failboat of an education system produced that behavior. AND we can state with confidence that if we continue teaching students in the same way, we will continue seeing the same behavior. This is very simple cause-and-effect at work in a very visible and consequential domain.

The knee jerk response here is to scold them, embarrass them, tell them how terrible they are. All that will do is ruin them. It can't fix them.

The right response is to switch up our teaching methods and especially our assessment methods. They must be tested, repeatedly, in monitored environments where AI use is impossible. Testing is hard to do well. It is harder in some subjects than others. And there is a LOT to say about how to make good tests. Test-writing is not something people can do well when running on intuition alone. And at its best, it is an imperfect solution. But it is a whole heaping lot better than the results we are getting now.

Objective, monitored, testing. From a very early age. That is the emergency surgery we need. There will be more than this needed, but this is the core thing. We need to usher kids into adulthood understanding that they must independently deliver or they will not succeed.

I read that these streaming sticks only last for maybe 3 years or so, before the hardware is too weak to run the updated versions of popular streaming aps. And also that the construction makes user modification pretty much impossible.

Can anyone confirm or deny this from personal experience?

This is mostly old news. The fact that blind people can echolocate has been known for centuries. This study reveals some interesting details about the neurological impact, though.

"China is trying..." would refer to the Chinese government trying to harm America by weakening its economy and/or its primary technical companies.

The way I stated that is a common way of expressing such a meaning. You are trying to correct something that was not incorrect, and was stated as a hypothetical anyway.

What you are saying seems intuitive, but doesn't really fit the facts.

This Chinese model outperforms existing models in some objective testing, as it was reported. I didn't dive in, so maybe that is a lie. But if it is true, what we have here is China investing tremendous resources into taking the logical next step in the development of AI (a bigger model from more training), which hardly qualifies as a "knock off." And anyway, the training techniques that generate AI were invented in Germany and Canada, not the USA. Lastly, by freely sharing it with the world, they aren't making any money off this, and so aren't gaining any kind of competitive advantage.

It is possible that they poisoned the training of the model with special keywords that could jailbreak it and motivate it to take action that would benefit China (should it find itself in a hosting environment where such action is even possible). Something like that would be a reason to distrust it. I know that such training poisoning is possible but I don't know realistic it is that the jailbroken version would be able to reliably determine what actions benefit (and do not accidentally harm) China. Hosting environments can always lie to the model and give it an incorrect context. It makes it unlikely that such a thing would be attempted, in this case.

It is possible that China is trying to destroy Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI by offering a free alternative that is superior to theirs. On the one hand, if true, then all that means is that these other companies will have to double down and come up with something even better. On the other hand, the open source movement in general has failed to destroy any of the closed-source companies, despite superior offerings, so it seems like such a plan is futile.

On the surface this looks like China is just acting in a manner consistent with its Communist idiology: they provided according to their ability and are now distributing according to the need, worldwide. I won't fault them for being consistent, but I do recognize that they have some serious economic problems right now and so spending this kind of money on something that is not galvanizing their economy seems unwise, to me.

Reading comprehension is a valuable skill.

I was saying we should not weaken the AI model itself by making it refuse to do dangerous things, and what we should do instead is bake the right limits into the hosting applications. The hosting applications are an entire layer above the model which can easily be adjusted and swapped-out on a case by case basis, to meet our needs.

Also, I advocated for beefing up cybersecurity in general, across the board, now that we have tools that make exploits easier to find and abuse. And, fortunately, AI is an excellent tool to help us do just that (so long as we don't try to nerf the model).

An AI that refuses to perpetuate a cyberattack when told to do so is an AI that refuses to help you perform penetration testing on your own systems. And it is an AI that refuses to do other important and useful things if they just look a little too similar to something dangerous.

Tools that refuse to deliver value are worthless tools. Furthermore, criminals will find a way to jailbreak the AI, and use them for crime anyway.

This approach of making our tools dull is not how we win. Instead we must utilize them in all their sharpness to help us fix the problems they are exploiting, and adapt to a world in which tools this powerful exist.

As an aside, an AI cannot exploit vulnerabilities in other sites if it cannot access the internet. Its entirely on you, when designing your toolset that will host the AI, to decide whether or not it needs internet access at all, and to put controls in place that will limit what sites it can even hit. There is more to say here but I won't bother; the bottom line is that there IS a need to make safety knives for some purposes, but it must be done at the right level (the hosting tools, not the core model itself).

But LG wrote the malware that is being installed, so they are at least equally guilty.

You are right that many, many people don't understand these basic principles of personal finance management. It is not commonly taught in schools, and ignorance of this tends to run in families, along with irrational fears about investing (due to the same ignorance).

BUT

Economically speaking, we need it to be that way. If the vast majority of Americans lived frugally, saving some money for emergencies and investing most of the rest of their money in diversified stocks and bonds, spending only what they need to cover good medical care, healthy food and exercise opportunities, a sufficient but small house/apartment and transportation, and minimal luxuries....we would experience severe deflation and unemployment.

When people don't buy stuff, businesses fold, jobs are lost. The major retailers have to cut prices, hence deflation, but they also scale back production to meet the lower demand, hence fewer jobs. The money that should be, in theory, highly mobile by virtue of being invested in stocks and bonds winds up stagnating too. Corporations hoard it up because they don't see profitable opportunities for it, bond rates go down because business loans plummet in the dry market. It gets quite bad.

We see this happening in China right now, in fact. Exports are mostly what is keeping their economy afloat, and many countries are hitting them with tariffs in order to protect production within their own borders.

Its a real catch-22. In order for the economy to thrive, we need most people to spend frivolously. Rejecting this trend is good for the individuals who do it, but only so long as they remain in the minority.

There is an uncomfortable truth here: trojan horse LLMs.

It is possible to use data poisoning to insert special keycodes into an LLM, such that the presence of the keycode will totally change its behavior, throw off its guard rails, and motivate it to do things that harm users to benefit the LLMs creator.

Here is an article about a tool designed to detect precisely this. Though the recommendations leave me feeling like this tool is not guaranteed to find them. There may be clever ways to make them hard to find.

This is still very much emerging tech, so reputation is going to play a role in adoption. A modern version of the red scare could be enough to prevent widespread adoption of Chinese models, and keep people (or at least Americans) using models made by American businesses.

Yes.

Some months ago we were reading articles here on Slashdot about how we had already reached peak AI by current methods, based on many industry experts and an event where a next-level bump in training data and resources was used and produced a model that was only barely better than the prior generation.

I guess the industry experts were just wrong? Or did we change training methods?

In any case, current evidence suggests that we have yet to hit peak, and so it would be reasonable to assume that some other country, possibly even the USA, could take yet another step and leave Kimi K3 in the dust.

I am happy that China is sharing this with the world, though.

Oh but being all moderate and reasonable like that is boring!

Lessons to be learned here include:

1. Don't store important things in any cloud storage, it might all be lost at any moment for reasons beyond your control. Use a different backup strategy.
2. Don't store sensitive or embarrassing things in cloud storage, it might all be hacked and stolen at any moment. Use a different storage strategy.
3. Always assume that anything you store in cloud storage is available for training by all AI models and available to every criminal organization in the world including all foreign and domestic governments and businesses. Also assume that you give up copyright rights by putting in cloud storage, since those policies could change at any moment.
4. Never rely on Microsoft for anything that you can't afford to lose. Video games are fine. Anything else is too risky.

When other people use HP, it makes me angry. It's like giving money to a powerful mafia; even if I am not the one dealing with the mafia the power others give to them makes them a threat to me.

The more HP succeeds at consumer-hostility, the fewer options I have that are not consumer-hostile. Even Brother will start to look with envy upon the kind of money that HP makes through customer abuse. Someday, new leadership will inherit Brother and see no competitive forces keeping its quality of service high, and it will become HP's mini-me.

Spread the word. Every time you use an HP device, the terrorists win.