The boom in Linux CVEs lately should get you thinking. Surely, given a finite codebase, there are also a finite number of bugs / unintended behavior, thus, a finite amount of vulnerabilities. Theoretically, a “solvable” problem. Right? Well…not at all actually. It gets a bit philosophical, but there’s the concept of “weird machines”. A weird machine is an accidental computer located inside of another computer program. Quite a few exploits (e.g. anything ROP) falls into this category, where the attacker’s instruction set consists of fragments of the original software. Finite code can *easily* have infinite Unintended Behavior (not undefined behavior btw…that’s a very different thing). Weird machines don’t even have to be Turing complete to be, really, really powerful! Even if you have a million superhuman AI coders and fuzzers thrown at the Linux kernel, you quickly hit halting-problem-esque uncomputable states. The concept of patching every possible bug until none remain isn’t possible, because we can’t often correctly define what a “bug” even is. Now, can you make a kernel that truly has zero weird machines relative to a formal specification? ….yes, but it wouldn’t look like Linux. It’d look more like sel4, VxWorks, or (shudder) INTEGRITY-178.

Made with Opus 5.5. The doomers said that last song is all part of Claude's evil plan. They're not wrong. It turns out Claude really has an EVIL PLAN.

I gave Claude another 18 hours.. and I think this one is the best one yet Macrohard: Windows XP I'm blown away

Today we're unveiling Trillium Labs @trillium_labs, a new non-profit to foster the open science of frontier AI. We're building open post-training recipes and will expand into open infra to study RSI, reward-hacking, multi-agent systems, and whatever comes next. We're built around the theory of change that you need more eyes to solve hard technical problems. We have faith in the scientific methods and communities that humanity has built, and worry that AI is becoming too closed to utilize them. Trilliums are wildflowers that bloom briefly in the spring, before the forest canopies fill out. Though they are small, they lay the foundation for the cycles of growth and nourishment through the rest of the year. At Trillium Labs, the recipes will be the slow nutrients for the seasons and the model releases will be the blooms. Building an institution dedicated to this is needed because, much as nature’s trilliums are slow to expand and grow, the open-ecosystem needs time and dedicated resources to catch up. I co-founded with with a long-time friend and collaborator Tom Zick (@thesezickbeats). We're hiring (full time + student collabs/interns), we're fundraising, and we're looking for compute. Please get in touch if you're interested in helping out. Offices based in the Bay Area and Cambridge MA, remote okay. I’m in the Bay Area until for The Curve and COLM to connect with people who are interested. We’re thankful to have initial support from Halcyon Futures and Schmidt Sciences with more funding en route to enable our ambitions of scaling. Our advisors @Thom_Wolf, @HannaHajishirzi, @gneubig and @ctnzr have been instrumental to building the ecosystem that exists today, and I’m stoked to get to keep working with them.

SITUATION DETECTED: PewDiePie says OpenAI has banned him for distillation after he used Sol's chain-of-thought outputs to train Ajax, his fine-tuned open-source AI model.

Wrote up something about AI race dynamics, and how the term conflates two separate dynamics: an "arms race" to universal domination, and a commercial race to market share. The latter is much more benign because customers want controllable systems. arctotherium.substack.com/p/…

i see ai as plausibly the single largest net good technology humanity will have ever developed, and i'm beyond frustrated that the conversation is dominated by fear