Israeli identity reveal, deepfaked content summaries, Altman/Ive device, wealthy kids, Cowen v. Haidt, and more…
UL NO. 427: AI's Predictable Future (Video)
Israeli identity reveal, deepfaked content summaries, Altman/Ive device, wealthy kids, Cowen v. Haidt, and more…
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Unsupervised Learning is a security, AI, and meaning-focused newsletter that looks at how best to thrive as humans in a world that’s changing faster than ever. It combines original ideas and analysis to bring you not just what’s happening—but why it matters, and how to respond.
TOC
- NOTES
- MY WORK
- SECURITY
- TECHNOLOGY
- HUMANS
- IDEAS & ANALYSIS
- DISCOVERY
- RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK
- APHORISM OF THE WEEK
NOTES
Hey there,
- Going to keynote a conference in NYC this week! Excited to talk about AI, security, and hope for the post-AI future.
- Conference season is spinning up. Can’t wait to see people. Things I have on deck. Numerous private panels/talks in the Bay Area, talk in NYC, Day of Shecurity, RSA, LocoMocoSec, EDC, big con in Switzerland, possibly others. And that will be enough for the year. The main goal is to not get Covid or Conflu this year.
- Had a great time at BSides Milwaukee!
- The soft launch of Threshold is going splendidly. I’m already getting MASSIVE benefits from using it myself, which is honestly my north star for the project. More on that in future posts/videos.
- Fabric continues to thrive, and I continue to think about the ultimate agent framework. Right now it’s Crew.ai, but I wonder what the model companies are going to have as a response, e.g., Anthropic incorporating tools right into their prompts this week.
Ok, let’s get to it…
MY WORK
I finally turned my big, 9,000-word AI predictions essay into a full video! It’s like 70 minutes long and includes lots of extra narration and detail outside of the text.
Please pass it on to people who would love the content but who could never get through a 9,000 word essay.
AI's Predictable Path
SECURITY
Israel's top spy chief, Yossi Sariel, accidentally revealed his identity through an Amazon book sale linked to his real name. MORE
The CVE and NVD databases are struggling to keep up with the massive number of vulnerabilities being created, leading to gaps and inaccuracies. This will need to get addressed somehow, but I’ve not heard any good suggestions. MORE
In Montreal, criminals are using Apple's AirTags to track and steal cars. MORE
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Panera Bread's week-long IT downtime incident was a ransomware attack. MORE
CISA's new High-Risk Communities webpage offers cyber hygiene guides, volunteer support, and discounted tools for organizations under cyber threat. MORE
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Israel's military used an AI named Lavender to pinpoint 37,000 potential Hamas targets, which is raising questions about the ethics of AI in warfare. MORE
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TECHNOLOGY
There’s a rumor that Sam Altman and Jony Ive are building some sort of AI wearable device through a new secret company. MORE
OpenAI released improved ways of fine-tuning models. MORE
📄 A new paper shows that adding more agents to large language models can significantly boost their performance. MORE
📄 This paper explores how AI might be leading us towards a 'knowledge collapse' by oversimplifying complex information. MORE
The U.S. is trying to get South Korea to stop chipmaking tool exports to China. MORE
The US is testing energy storage in heated sand, aiming for 135 MW power output for five days straight. MORE
Oura's rolling out Symptom Radar to give you a nudge when your body's showing signs of strain, but it's not calling it illness detection. For obvious reasons. MORE
Amazon's ditching its cashierless "Just Walk Out" tech in Fresh stores for Dash Carts, finding the futuristic checkout too costly and complex. Disappointing. Too early I guess. MORE
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HUMANS
New studies are showing that the wealthy are starting to have more kids than the poor, reversing the previous trend. MORE
NASA's doing a live stream of the eclipse. MORE | SPACEX STREAM
Despite a massive earthquake, TSMC's crucial EUV equipment remained unharmed because they have some wicked building stabilization tech. Production was almost fully restored the same day. MORE
The Israeli military dismissed two senior officers and reprimanded three others for an airstrike that mistakenly killed seven World Central Kitchen volunteers in Gaza. MORE
The UK's exporting workers to fill higher-paying US jobs. MORE
U.S. venture capital investments plummeted to $36.6 billion in Q1 2024, which is the lowest quarterly total since 2017. MORE
💡I had a wonderful conversation with Mike Privette from Return on Security about these VC and overall economic trends, which will be released soon.
McKinsey's offering UK employees nine months of pay to voluntarily leave the company. MORE
Gen-Z is going for trades like welding and plumbing over college and student debt. MORE
Home insurers are now using aerial images to decide who gets dropped from coverage. MORE
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IDEAS & ANALYSIS
Another View of Imposter Syndrome (Click for thread)
ᴅᴀɴɪᴇʟ ᴍɪᴇssʟᴇʀ ☕️📚💡 @DanielMiessler
Working harder isn’t the solution to imposter syndrome, in my opinion.
The solution is to work on big problems that are super important to solve. That way your internal focus isn’t on you. Or your work.
It’s on the problem and what you can do to address it.
Jamie Maguire | MVP in AI @jamie_maguire1
Outwork your imposter syndrome.
9:43 PM • Apr 5, 2024
34 Likes 3 Retweets
4 Replies
Tyler Cowen vs. Jonathan Haidt on Teen Girl Depression
Well, I never thought I’d see Tyler Cowen be wrong about something major. But I think he did it here with Jonathan Haidt. He had Jonathan on the show and massively disagreed with him about his research into teen (especially girl) depression being caused by social media. Worth a watch.
Jonathan Haidt on Adjusting to Smartphones and Social Media | Conversations with Tyler
The specific thing I think Tyler is getting wrong is the AI Mediation part, which I have written about extensively. He’s right that we’ll have AI mediation, but I think he’s wrong that it’ll work the way he thinks it will.
He seems to think that AI will stop young girls from browsing the most viral and toxic content on social media, and it’ll just send her the summary instead. Problem solved.
Um, no. That’s how HE will use it. And how I will use it. And how Jonathan will use it. And probably you, too.
But for young people consuming viral and toxic content, the content itself is the point, not the summary.
Does Tyler think AI will send people who love standup comedy a summary of the jokes made in a given standup, as a substitute for going to comedy shows?
🤖 Here’s your summary of this standup:
- 3 jokes on women and stereotypes
- 4 jokes on how clumsy he is
- 2 playful racist jokes
- 2 hecklers were addressed
- Applause was 3/5 compared to other performers
We hope you’ve enjoyed this hilarious AI summary from ComixAI.
That doesn’t work for comedy, and it won’t work for young kids consuming viral/toxic content. The only way that can work is if they had a draconic blocker of all social media, and this was liked a service that summarized the content.
But it wouldn’t be something the kids would install themselves, nor happily use.
All that being said though, he is Tyler Cowen, so my chances of misunderstanding him and/or being wrong here are higher than usual.
—
Deepfaked Content Summaries (Click for thread)
ᴅᴀɴɪᴇʟ ᴍɪᴇssʟᴇʀ ☕️📚💡 @DanielMiessler
Crap I just realized what the main interface for content is going to be in the next few years.
Anything you put out as text, audio, slides or video will be extracted into text, and AI will create multiple video deepfakes of it at different depth levels.
1/n
4:02 PM • Apr 7, 2024
21 Likes 2 Retweets
1 Reply
AI and Music (Click for thread)
ᴅᴀɴɪᴇʟ ᴍɪᴇssʟᴇʀ ☕️📚💡 @DanielMiessler
It’s weird that people think AI is going to ruin music.
It’s like they forgot about pop, which is little more than few cords and a hook.
Same with doing customer service, sales calls, etc.
We forget how low the bar is for being better than an average human.
3:06 PM • Apr 7, 2024
19 Likes 0 Retweets
3 Replies
DISCOVERY
🔥⚒️Luke Stephens (hakluke) put out an amazing blog on his evolving approach to bug bounty automation. He talks about going from Bash, to Python, to Golang, and then arriving at Cloud-native. Great piece. MORE
🔥Thomas Roccia wrote an amazing piece on applying LLMs to Threat Intelligence. Includes a full notebook for running agents using Langchain that perform various TI tasks. MORE | THE CODE NOTEBOOK
🛠️SWE-agent - Autonomously fixes bugs in GitHub repos, showing a 12% success rate by leveraging language models like GPT-4. By Princeton Natural Language Processing | MORE
💻 Burr is a Python framework that simplifies building GenAI apps by managing state with easy-to-use building blocks. | by DAGWorks-Inc | MORE
📖GIAM, a free open-source textbook, makes the art of mathematics accessible, covering foundational topics and proof techniques, complete with amusing chapter quotes. MORE
⚙️ Gram turns threat modeling into a self-hosted web app, making it easier for teams to collaborate on security. | by Klarna-Incubator | MORE
🔧 ChatGPT now lets you tweak images, like removing objects or changing parts, just by describing what you want in the chat. | MORE
🔧 Claude API's new "tools" feature lets it tap into the internet, opening up a world of data it couldn't touch before. | MORE
Kids are learning math from deepfake Taylor Swift and Drake on TikTok, and it's surprisingly effective. MORE
💡 I’m honestly super excited for deepfakes for these types of use-cases. Take the bad and find the good. Like, if kids absolutely love Taylor Swift, or Star Wars, let’s use that for education, tutoring, therapy, etc.
We need to be careful with it, of course, and watch out for IP issues, but there’s a lot of good that can come from this.
RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK
Check out one of suno.ai’s top AI-generated songs.
Mozart On the Bass
You might not like it, but if you don’t, how different is it from other stuff you don’t? Is it that much worse? And if you do like it, how much can you tell it’s not human-generated?
APHORISM OF THE WEEK
❝
Don’t explain your philosophy. Embody it.
Epictetus
Thank you for reading.
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