UL NO. 409: Autonomous Kill Drones, AI Job Replacement, Apple NameDrop Misinformation, Human/AI Gap Benchmarks

Unsupervised Learning is a Security, AI, and Meaning-focused podcast that looks at how best to thrive as humans in a post-AI world. It combines original ideas, analysis, and mental models to bring not just the news—but why it matters, and how to respond.

Good morning!

This was supposed to be one of our weeks off due to the holidays, but I thought I’d put out a short episode anyway. A couple of stories and some great Discovery links.

Hope you’re enjoying some down/slow time!

MY WORK

Got a cool shoutout from Jen Easterly this week for our SEC vs. Solarwinds piece. So much respect for the energy and execution she’s brought to US Cyber.

SECURITY

A bunch of sources (including police department warnings) are sharing misinformation about Apple’s new NameDrop feature, saying you can just steal the information by being close to someone. In fact you have to touch phones, and then give permission. MORE

The Pentagon is actually looking to build the autonomous kill drones talked about in Daniel Suarez’s book Kill Decision. These are systems that can find and kill targets without active guidance. Basically give them target and off they go! The idea is to make them as resistant as possible to various types of countermeasures. MORE

Advisories:

• ⚠️ Scattered Spider Alert — The FBI and CISA warn of the Scattered Spider group's advanced social engineering and SIM swapping tactics. | SEVERITY: HIGH | RESPONSE: U.S. officials urge victims to report incidents to help track and stop the hackers. MORE

Incidents:

• ⚠️ Massive Health Data Breach — Nearly 9 million patient records were exposed in a cyberattack on a medical transcription company. | SEVERITY: CRITICAL | RESPONSE: Free identity theft services offered to affected patients. MORE

Companies:

• 🧱Lasso Security is a Tel Aviv-based startup that focuses on protecting large language models from data leaks and attacks. I expect many of the API security companies to move in this space too. MORE

TECHNOLOGY

Researchers have launched GAIA, a new benchmark that tests the gap between humans and AI. GAIA challenges AI with tasks easy for humans but tough for AI, showing a 92% success rate for humans versus 15% for GPT-4. The benchmark includes 466 questions designed to test fundamental abilities like reasoning and web browsing, with a leaderboard hosted online to track AI performance. MORE

HUMANS

60% of Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck. MORE

Tesla just fired up a Nvidia H100 GPU cluster to push its self-driving car development. The new cluster of 10,000 GPUs is aimed at processing the massive data from Tesla's fleet to speed up the creation of fully autonomous vehicles. MORE

China is warning Argentina not to break with Beijing after electing Milei. The previous administration under President Fernandez deepened ties with China, considering it a close ally and even moving towards joining BRICS. The new guy is likely to reverse the pursuit of BRICS membership and even possibly cut off interactions with China and Brazil. MORE

Scientists just spotted Amaterasu, an ultra-high-energy cosmic ray from space with energy over 240 exa-electron volts. It's one of the most energetic particles ever seen, dwarfing the power of the Large Hadron Collider. The mystery deepens as its trajectory suggests it comes from the Local Void, which is a place that shouldn’t have that kind of energy. MORE

IDEAS & ANALYSIS

🔥Enterprise AI is Coming (See SPQA)
Amazon just launched Q at their annual Red Wedding in Vegas. It’s an AI chatbot for companies, which is something we’ve been talking about here at UL since March. It’s happening, folks. And it’s going to massively change the jobs that are needed in a company. I mean these things coming out now are just barely a year from the announcement of ChatGPT, which is basically the start of AI. And it took companies like 6 months to even get their footing. What we’ll have in a year will be unbelievably powerful, and largely based on the combination of Context + Agents. This will massively disrupt the knowledge worker labor market. We’re talking about going from a world where an average person could have a job for 30 years just by moving paperwork and sending emails. That’s about to be finished. Now you will need to be a ninja problem-solver, and highly fluent in AI, if you want to stay employed. It’s almost (but not quite) like—you’re either launching an AI company, or you’re an AI ninja contractor/employee, or you’re waiting to be replaced by one of those. Get. Ready. MORE

Audiobooks for Listening Practice
Simon Sarris makes an argument that audiobooks are a great tool for making us better listeners. I really like this idea, and I’ve noticed that it seems to be the case for a few people I’ve seen make the transition. If this is true I think it’d be a huge upgrade overall. Only problem is it’s hard to get real people to speak at 1.8x. I suppose you could ask, though. MORE

NOTES

Nearly done with my first Murikami book, Kafka on the Shore. I have to say it’s probably the craziest and most creative thing I’ve ever read. Like, I never know where it’s going.

DISCOVERY

🦾 Awesome-GPT-Agents — A community-built collection of GPT models tailored for various cybersecurity tasks, both offensive and defensive. | by Thomas Roccia | MORE

🪄Grimoire — Create a website with a sentence. One of the top GPTs in the world right now. MORE

⚒️ Claude 2.1 — Anthropic's latest AI model aims to improve on safety and usability. MORE

🔎 Ripgrep 14 Released — The popular search tool ripgrep just launched version 14 with hyperlink support and a faster regex engine. | MORE

🎨 tldraw — Quickly sketch a UI and bring it to life with this intuitive drawing tool. MORE

⚔️ Arsenal — A pentest command inventory and launcher that simplifies remembering and using complex commands. | by unknown MORE

📈 ALERTA-net — An AI model by SDSU researchers for predicting stock trends using various datasets. MORE

⚒️ LM Studio — A platform to find, download, and use local large language models easily. MORE

😊 Positive Hacker News RSS — A custom RSS feed that only shows positive Hacker News stories, using sentiment analysis to filter out the negativity. | by garritfra | MORE

The complete guide to iOS and macOS development in Neovim MORE 

Navy's Cyber Reboot MORE

AI is the new Shadow IT MORE

RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

It’s time to start deciding which of these you—and your kids—are:

1. Someone launching a new AI-powered business

2. An elite consultant/contractor/employee who can use AI to solve any problem

3. An ultra-elite specialist in some niche field that’s not vulnerable to AI

4. An extremely business-savvy product manager type who can blend customer requirements with design and AI tooling and product management

5. Someone unemployed or about to be unemployed

Which of these are you? Which of these are your friends, and kids, and loved ones going to be?

It’s time to get very serious about how you answer this question.

APHORISM OF THE WEEK

Thank you for reading.

UL is a personal and strange combination of security, tech, AI, and lots of deeply human content. And because it’s so diverse, it’s harder for it to go as viral as something more niche.

So if you know someone weird like us, please share it with them. 🫶 

Yours,