The ones in Russia definitely are. They don’t have to be local models - you run them in the cloud like anyone else.

The idea that the frontier labs have LLMs with special capabilities that make them dramatically better than the top open-weight models is largely marketing.

The reality is that most systems are poorly secured, and LLMs make exploiting vulnerabilities fast, cheap, and easy. What would have taken a trained security researcher weeks before can be done by a much less skilled attacker with an LLM in a few hours.

This is correct. We can thrash all we want about slop and hallucinations, but from a defensive posture position, the models only need to be right some of the time and they still constitute a threat.

Knowing it sucks and pretending it doesn’t exist are two different things.

the models only need to be right some of the time and they still constitute a threat.

Right!?!

And with how cheap and fast they are to run, they don’t have to be right that often as long as a separate run can verify/validate claims. In a lot of ways what the LLMs do should probably be thought of as just a very sophisticated sort of brute force approach. You’re effectively just searching the space of combinations of known vulnerabilities. It doesn’t require particular cleverness, just an encyclopedic knowledge, a reasonable way to prune the search space, and the ability to put in the compute time.

You don’t need something that power to do damage. And fuck the frontier model of 6 months ago and now are basically two entirely different things. In another six months?

Claude fable had a bunch of concerns on release and you don’t think what evers out in the next year isnt going to beat it?

Getting a bunch of beat up Mac minis together and running something isn’t that hard for a mid tier operation. They don’t have to be fast. They just have to turn on.