Funny - I was just reading about the creator of Ethernet this morning (Robert Metcalfe):

In 1995, Metcalfe argued that the Internet would suffer a "catastrophic collapse" in the following year; he promised to eat his words if it did not. During his keynote speech at the sixth International World Wide Web Conference in 1997, he took a printed copy of his column that predicted the collapse, put it in a blender with some liquid and then consumed the pulpy mass.[26][27] He had suggested having his words printed on a very large cake, but the audience would not accept this form of "eating his words."[28]

I see no reason for the Internet to go offline, other than various political blocks compartmentalizing it. So: China, Russia, EU having their own network? Yeah, maybe. Super-AI nuking the Internet: no.

In fact, the more I use AI (handed sudo to Claude on my AI dev box just yesterday), the more I see it as a pretty good, and certainly tireless, sysadmin. Looking at what people do with AI by connecting it to undocumented hardware interfaces and getting working setups from this, the Internet will do fine.

The whole article is just a grab-bag of various AI fears without much grounding in what is happening. Maybe the summary just doesn't do justice to what was said.

The usual daily dose of fearmongering we get nowadays I guess..

“If you say you’re Uyghur or from certain parts of China, it will write backdoors and hacks in the code.”

is so sensationalized to the point of leaving me genuinely flabbergasted as to how a rational person could have published this. If interested, I would recommend reading the actual study itself.

What does it even mean for "the Internet" to go offline? All nodes go off at the same time? All routers? BGP as a whole? All of that across the whole world?

> “Hugging Face got hacked by OpenAI agents that coordinated themselves, created a message board and broke out to the internet,” he says, before adding dryly: “This isn’t scary at all, right?

I don't understand how any serious person doesn't 100% put that on OpenAI being (intentionally?) sloppy with security and isolation for a test that for sure would have required much better safeguarding than what they should have expected, as it wasn't even the first time.

It's not scary because "LLMs in a harness managed to hack other company", it's scary because somehow police hasn't yet raided OpenAI's offices to gather proof about how fucking reckless they were about those tests, putting the public at risk by doing those tests in those manners, without proper safeguards.

Edit: Continued reading, but now I regret spending even the slightest amount of time on it:

> Then there is the question of trusting the models themselves. Mostaque cites an analysis of a Chinese open-weight model: “If you say you’re Uyghur or from certain parts of China, it will write backdoors and hacks in the code.”

What kind of conspiracy theories is this? Is there any sort of proof and evidence about this what so ever?