"Car driving toward cliff edge hasn't gone off cliff edge yet."

Whatever your feelings about small AI models, "it hasn't happened yet" is a really dumb reaction to a prediction about a rapidly advancing future.

Sometimes you think they're trying to give it ideas

um, this is an easy way to make edge models illegal.... fuck those clowns.

It's bizarre to see a tech-focused news site adopt this myopic view that we don't need to worry about things that don't exist yet. Surely the Register is aware that software is a fast-moving field!

They are just doing this to hype their product so that they can sell stocks before IPO! SMH it’s so evident

… ”again.”

News outlets always seem to forget “again” in the title.

Mass extinction is cute and all... IPOcalypse is what they fear the most.

They just want to help create regulations which act as a barrier to entry for newcomers. And China.

Very surprising that a recognizable news outlet actually called out the blatant fearmongering in a headline instead of just uncritically regurgitating Anthropic's claim.

This is just yet another attempt from the cult to try to build a regulatory moat so they can stave off having to compete on price, like how OpenAI is having to do on the lower tier models (among other things).

On the one hand, if they were really concerned about their software producing a self-replicating and adapting AI worm, they'd take steps to make sure that never happens. If it did happen, they'd be sued into oblivion. They probably just want to pump up their IPO and maybe get some regulatory lock-in to make life tough for late-starting competitors.

On the other hand, a self-replicating and adapting AI worm does sound legitimately pernicious. Not world ending, but possibly an end to the online world.

How would a "9-billion-parameter model" replicate on IoT devices that have typically no more than 2-4 MB of RAM or 8-16 MB of flash?

There were articles in my the local newspaper at my parents saying that some guy said no one but a few people know where frontier AI really is and that these kind of articles are not scaremongering but perhaps as sign where anthropic actually is in the development of their models in the lab. So the propaganda is working.