alt Hacker News> Their position makes no sense to me.
If one assumes that they don't actually care about security, and care very deeply about getting sensational press, their position makes a lot of sense.
For all their chatter about how incredibly important "alignment" is, they still haven't bothered to remember the 30->50 year old computer security principle of "Don't blindly do what some random stranger tells you to do." and ensure that system instructions, user instructions, and instructions from untrusted sources are indelibly marked with their category and treated according to those markings. Every single time one of these systems fails to distinguish between these three classes of instructions -or confuses its internal chatter with user instructions-, that's proof that the major LLM companies cannot be bothered to follow one of the most basic computer security principles.
"But it's all vectors, not language! The LLM can't tell where the instructions came from", one might retort. I'd reply: "Neither can a CPU, but somehow we managed to make it work way back in the day. Amazing, isn't it?".
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I get the impression that every AI lab is desperately trying to figure out how to unambiguously separate instructions from data in their token streams. The fact that they haven't managed to yet suggests to me that it's a very, very difficult problem.
The entire economic premise and value case of LLMs rests on the idea that instructions need not be provided in advance, and that the model can "reason" based on evidence and "decide" what to do next.
Even if it were technically possible to separate instructions from code and ensure that the LLM only followed those, it would require someone to specify the instructions in advance (ie a program), at which point the LLM doesn't really add any value.
> "Neither can a CPU, but somehow we managed to make it work way back in the day. Amazing, isn't it?".
I feel this completely misunderstands the problem, and the vast gulf between an LLM and a CPU.
First and most importantly, the set of behaviors of a CPU is extremely constrained, and we have a very simple model for which behaviors are safe and which are not. Writing to addresses between X and Y, executing certain instructions - unsafe; everything else, safe. In contrast, an LLM has a huge array of possible behaviors, and variations of those behaviors, and it's very unclear which are safe and which are not. Is emitting the text "sudo rm -rf /" safe? Yes, in some contexts, such as writing this HN comment ; absolutely not in others, such as generating a command that an agent will execute. How do you check which is which? What if it emits "sudo rm -rf /usr/sbin/../.. ", is that safe?
Secondly, CPUs can absolutely be used to hack other people. Nothing in the permission model helps in any way prevent other computers from being attacked by your CPU. So exactly the part we care most about in AI security is the part that has never been solved, for any computing system ever created.