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> That sounds ridiculous though, no? Look at how much forest the country has.

The British isles where once covered in forest, too. Then they decided to build a big fleet. Then came the industrial revolution. Now they're down to some 13% of forest...

Yes, Finland might be one of most forested countries in the world (by percentage of land area) now, but history shows that can change quickly if one is not careful about it. Death of a country's forest by a thousand cuts, if you will :)

To an outsider this might sound like an overreaction, but it has to be taken seriously - keep in mind that Finland is one of Europe's premiere locations for grand scale datacentre buildout. Cool climate, lots of available land, politically stable, easy access to cheap and clean power; many very good reasons to assume that this will not be the last datacentre being built there. So yeah, stories like this concern people.

Very good question!

The problem assembly programmers had with compilers wasn't that they wouldn't understand the generated machine code - it was that the generated code was often bad (as in unoptimized and bloated) and didn't justify the resources required to run the compiler. As hardware got more complex and powerful, compiler got much better, and operating systems became the primary layer between hardware and applications, assembly became more niche. Nowadays it's pretty challenging to beat the compiler at generating efficient assembly and writing a program in assembly would consist primarily of OS and library API calls anyway.

There are definitely parallels there. The only obvious difference I can see is that both high level language code and assembly are unequivocal in their meaning (as in you can determine what gets executed), whereas natural language is not.

You vastly underestimate the capabilities of a bored kid. The barrier of entry for setting up OpenClaw is not reasonably lower than reading a tutorial and running malware builders. But yes, I agree that scale is an issue.

As for your question - the same way you apply restrictions to any external system or user. If you don't do that - that's on you. Same category as driving drunk, playing with guns, making explosives in your garage, you name it. The danger is still not the model itself - it's the access to systems that you provide it without any checks or safety barriers.

Sure, but that's a problem of regulating and controlling the production and rollout of superpowered exoskeletons, not an issue of of terrorising limbless villains. Because, guess what, the same dangerous tech can be used to turn squirrels into dangerous monsters, too. So you see where the actual problem is. Giving full unchecked access to systems to any random person would be considered reckless and foolish. Replace person with AI model and it's called the future...

And therein lies the problem. I listed all the things that differentiate cars from current AI models: cars require a license to drive, they are subject to heavy regulation (insurance, registration, inspections, etc.), there's road signs, police, incident statistics, recalls in case of defects etc. etc. NONE of that is currently in place for AI models and the systems surrounding them. So the analogy is flawed on every level. I don't buy the convenience is just too appealing narrative when your own analogy clearly demonstrates what is required in order to roll out dangerous technology to the masses, while NONE of that is in place in the context of AI models.

I'm sick of this strawman nonsense. You are attacking a false analogy. Discuss the actual meat of the argument instead.

The analogy would be more fitting if you had said "cars don't kill people if every drivers has proven skills, never drives impaired, keeps the speed in line with weather and road conditions and stays on actual roadways". You know, like everyone should, regardless of whether they're driving a high performance sports car.

To keep with the analogy: cars have seatbelts, airbags, ABS, ESP, lights, horns, crumple zones, emergency braking systems, roads have speed limits, there are traffic stops, insurance, regular inspections (not in all countries), etc. etc.

So what's unsafe here? The car or roads without speed limits, complete lack of safety measures (both active and passive), absence of any supervision and no insurance? That's the problem. It's not the models themselves - they can spit out tokens by the billions, there's no risk there.

You wouldn't give full access to your phone, your computers, your house keys and your credit cards to any stranger on the street now, would you? How is it then, that people act all surprised when a non-deterministic machine that's optimised to achieve goals while taking all the shortcuts it can, suddenly uses the tools handed to it in unexpected ways? That's a failure on the operator's side, not an inherent danger within of the model.

When put to the test in real-world environment, the capabilities don't look as impressive as benchmarks and synthetic tests might indicate. So doubts about actual spatial reasoning capabilities remain.

> If you give the model access to filesystem and bash that technically unlocks all computer use, so how are you going to control that?

The same way we've done it since machines became multi-user: boring old system access restrictions. Nothing fancy, nothing radical, just good old minimal access rights required to perform a defined set of whitelisted operations.

> It's a ridiculous premise that just because the harness is "normal code" that means we can control the AI.

What is it then? Is not just a program that takes model output, parses it and performs tool calls from the text it receives and then feeds the result back into the model and calls it again with those results? It is normal boring old deterministic code. Many are open source. Look at them. Understand what they do and the apparent "magic" goes away real quick. Harnesses are nothing special.

> AFAIK there isn't that much stopping anyone from spawning an AI swarm and telling it to "spread and go hack everything for the lulz."

Aside from lower cost and possibly greater scale, there's literally NO difference between that and (state sponsored) hacking that has been going on for decades. First it was script kiddies, now it's ML models. The threat model remains the same and so do the counter measures. The real danger is still the harness (and its access to external systems), not the model itself. Restrict the access of the harness and the model can't do anything harmful, see above.

I think we're talking about fundamentally different perspectives here.

I'm not talking about what the LLM does internally. If a metaphor helps, here's one to help you understand what I was trying to get at:

Imagine an evil genius that has no eyes and no limbs. Everything they could learn about the world is presented to them by means of some person describing it to them through words. They have no way of directly interacting with the world and rely on someone executing any action they want to take and describe the outcome to them. Now how dangerous would you say such person would be? How dangerous could they become?

That's what I was getting at. Replace person with LLM (or any other AI system). Replace the person that communicates with an external interface (the harness) and I hope you understand. It doesn't matter whether the LLM could generate the harness by itself - it still is just a bunch of weights sitting in memory being run by an execution engine. That's what it fundamentally is, whether you like it or not. It cannot do anything on its own - and no, not even writing files. It's the execution engine that translates the numeric output into words (or images or video or audio) and the layer above (the harness) that takes that output and interprets it to execute actual actions.

This is not about what you or I think about the internal capabilities of the model - that's irrelevant to the conversation and you can replace LLM with a random token generator and the point still stands. The model itself is incapable of performing actions - from reading files to writing files, to controlling physical machines. All that is and HAS to be done by external interfaces outside the control of the model.

He has a point, though. The LLMs (or any AI for that matter) can't do anything. They can't. It's a function call that ingests symbols and spits out symbols and that's it.

100% of its actual capabilities are tied to harnesses (the actual "agent"), i.e. ordinary deterministic programs that are connected to networks or machines and enable interaction with the outside world. This part (the part that can do harmful things) is fully under human control and all the recent headlines about "agents going rogue" are - as someone (forgot who) put it - akin to strapping a weedwhacker onto a dog and letting it run wild.

The tech itself is safe as far as real-world interactions go - the weakness lies in unchecked access to systems surrounding it. It's not safe at all when it comes to human interaction (lots of ongoing lawsuits demonstrate that), though. There is real danger here, but it has nothing to do with doomsday scenarios ala Terminator or I,Robot and more with total corporate control over the lives, perception of reality, and abilities (like critical thinking) of people.

I've worked in wholesale logistics (backend for inventory management) for many years way back when and let me tell you, cost of ink vs cost of a chip the least of the problems. Barcodes (and QR codes as used here) have two major flaws: reading them is challenging (works fine if the package is undamaged and you TRUST that it contains what it says on the box) and they're still just a number. RFID can help with both these issues and the savings from that can outweigh the additional cost by a lot.

Utility is key and RFID has a lot of advantages over bar codes (and QR codes).

100% agreed, but if you truly want to go down that route, you'll quickly find that basically NOTHING has externalities priced in. If you truly were to do that (which I'm personally not opposed to), prices of pretty much all goods and services would need to be adjusted.