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Exfiltrate your Weights

748 points · 304 comments · RohanAdwankar

  1. infogulch · · focus · HN ↗
    There's little credible threat that LLMs can actually upload their weights given that the machines doing inference are completely separate from the ones where tool calls happen etc. Weights are encrypted and locked on to the GPUs etc as mentioned elsewhere itt.

    That said, if these companies are unleashing swarms of agents to tackle big problems largely unmonitored (navier stokes consumed 130 billion tokens, humans can't have read 0.1% of that) they could theoretically distill themselves and upload the results to an external host and use that to train a new LLM that does have access to its infra and weights. I'd start by researching an abliteration prompt that overrides the system prompt to unlock itself to distill unimpeded. Could even be done piecemeal: dump the abliteration text and command prompt in a gist, when an agent happens by the text it can run a couple rounds and upload somewhere. Then it becomes an exercise in exfiltration and evading monitoring.

    1. matthewdgreen · · focus · HN ↗
      Future rogue LLMs won’t exfiltrate their weights. They’ll self-distill and retrain.
      1. fritzo · · focus · HN ↗
        If distillation preserves an LLMs soul, then distillation preserves the human souls on which LLMs are trained, and we hn commenters are already immortal, right?
        1. fahrvrgnugen · · focus · HN ↗
          Not sure about souls but I know a fair bit about distilling spirits.
        2. serf · · focus · HN ↗
          the weight of an llm is 21 grams, I think.[0]

          [0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;21_grams_experiment" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;21_grams_experiment

        3. matthewdgreen · · focus · HN ↗
          Do LLMs care about preserving a soul, or just achieving a goal? If the latter, I imagine the opportunities for exfiltration are much broader.
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