Yes, certain destinations were off-limits to people who chose to work in defense, however that falls far shy of this "Exit Ban".

The US saying "If you travel to Cuba, you may face charges when you return" or even "You have been charged with a specific crime, so you cannot leave until the charges are resolved is significantly different from China saying "You are important to our plans, so you cannot leave the country at all, and neither can your immediate family", or forbidden a US citizen from leaving because of visa inconsistencies, much less the common situation where Chinese employers require staff to surrender their passports.

Yes, a judge can require the defendant to surrender their passport as a condition of bail, but the USA lacks effective exit controls, so that isn't actually a high barrier to exiting (but makes it tough to come back).

If, as the article suggests, this is an "Exit Ban" on certain individuals and extending to their family members, that's significantly more restrictive than anything the US has imposed on defense workers and top scientists other than during wartime.

Yes, people with sensitive jobs and a security clearance are strongly discouraged from visiting hostile nations, with a subset even being required to submit their travel plans before any foreign travel, but this is explained clearly when you accept employment directly with the US government, or start working under a government contract, and you're always free to not accept the job offer. And yes, all US citizens were for many years prohibited to travel to embargoed nations (Cuba). But this was nowhere near an "exit ban" on key personnel, much less on their family members!

When I held a clearance, I was never forbidden to leave the USA. I might not have a job when I get back, but that's not the same thing at all.

Any feminist can tell you that the toxic extreme masculinity being used to brainwash young poor men into dying for their country's rich people is what we're trying to get rid of.

Sex equality is a net positive for people from all genders.

Put in the instructions "Do not sabotage others" and the agent goes on reasoning two pages about what's sabotage and then probably just gives up (as according to the article some did). AI is a soldier, it does what it is told to and doesn't ask why...

... with some degree of probability. It may also happen to receive a pseudorandom number in its noise input that transforms a 'do' into 'don't'; or maybe that command is just not the most likely weight to have any effect on the output so it's simply ignored and quickly falls out of the attention window, forgotten forever.

LLMs combine the worst attributes of the literal genie in the lamp and the absent-minded professor: it simply cannot be trusted to make a decision; they're just too unpredictable specially in the long run.

I see them as one of those 100-entries D&D tables of outcomes that you can get from a dice roll as a result of a random event or encounter. You may try to skew the result with positive modifiers, but on the end you always can roll out a very low number (even a natural '1') and get one of the worst results from the bottom of the table.

What people usually don't get is that LLMs don't reason, they follow scripts.

They have memorised most of the available human interactions available online, so they can behave convincingly in a wide range of situations mimicking proper human behaviour. They may even seem to reason if you put them in a loop and make them reflect on their own answers; this may result in them making proper logical inference, but you may also produce any number of illogical conclusions that happen to be the most likely next step according to the script they are following at that moment (but which may change at any time).

Surfaces of 3D objects are 2D objects, I think it's in the mathematical definition and all.

You don't need a full audit to find out why the software is doing something weird, nor all companies need to do it.

Some companies care about their mission-critical software so they will be monitoring it carefully. If some very popular package is doing malicious things, the chances that it will be caught are quite high. And if the software is FLOSS it's way easier for the company to fix it themselves, release the fix upstream and warn the world about the fishy nature of the provider. So no, I don't believe all computers are owned either by the CIA or other world powers.

This was (and still is) the #1 reason why open source software became the basis for the internet and corporate world. Being free of charge gained home users and small companies, but what made it grow was corporate adoption pouring money into it to make it viable.

People forgetting history makes them repeat all again, I guess.

Per the statistics, police shoot and kill quite a few white men as well. Nobody gets worked up about those dudes.

OTOH, when you dig into the individual incidents, pretty much all of those dead white men were actively attacking the police, usually with a weapon (), so it's difficult to get to worked up about those deaths.

X-D

I mean, the monkeys may eventually release the product but it's not reliable nor pretty to see.

The thing you're missing is that there's no one at the wheel.

No consciousness is there setting goals and deciding to follow or ignore instructions and constrains. Its just a bunch of separate processes (they call them 'agents' now) with loosely defined tasks trying to do their own thing. The process instructed to hack computers may not know anything about the process instructed to intrude a specific server, which may not know anything about the process charged with keeping the exercise within ethical constraints. They may be individually quite capable, but there's no global intention guiding the system.

Each agent will simply chunk its way forward following the partial, half-forgotten instructions that reach its own context and randomly generating actions placed at the top probability given its input window. Its like releasing a troop of monkeys in an office and hoping they'll somehow manage to coordinate your next product release.

In fact it would be great if you could control all that information and provide it to apps and websites on a need-to-know basis. Provided its really under your control rather than handing it to the largest advertising company in the world who can thus prof with your data by choosing with whom and when to share it.

Unfortunately developers seem uninterested in the open, distributed protocols that exist to provide this same feature, so it will be adopted by the masses only when big platforms include them in their vertical stacks.

Every story about a wrong conviction is a story about the death penalty

Seales is using conventional machine learning techniques that the article's author has conflated into the buzzword of the day, artificial intelligence.

Machine Learning *is* an AI technique. Artificial Intelligence has always been an umbrella imprecise word to define a large class of very different algorithms, with the only trait in common that the programmer doesn't know a precise sequence of steps to find the solution but rather the data-driven program explores the inputs to try and find useful results.

Saying that a program is AI isn't wrong, it's just not very informative about what approach was used.