UL NO. 451: Altman Says ASI in "Thousands of Days"

SECURITY | AI | PURPOSE
UNSUPERVISED LEARNING is a newsletter about upgrading to thrive in a world full of AI. It’s original ideas, analysis, mental models, frameworks, and tooling to prepare you for the world that’s coming.

TOC

• NOTES

• MY WORK

• SECURITY

• AI / TECH

• HUMANS

• DISCOVERY

• IDEAS

• RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

• APHORISM OF THE WEEK

NOTES

Hope you’re having a good start to the week!

• Thomas Roccia created a web GUI for Fabric called Fabric UI! Really slick! FABRIC UI

• In the last few days I’ve probably spent 5 hours deep cleaning my mobile phone environment. Deleted probably 40 applications, phone screen cleanup, widgets refactor, watch faces cleanup, Focus modes redo, app subscriptions cleaning, etc. So much cruft removed. Super cathartic. Timed with new iPhone, which happens every year, but this year was a major clean.

MY WORK

o1 Use Cases
I did an analysis of OpenAI’s long-form conversation with the o1 (strawberry) team, where they talked about how they built it, how it’s different from previous models, what they use it for, etc. I also used o1-preview to pull out a list of their favorite use cases for o1 where it’s better than previous models. MORE | THE INTERVIEW | THEIR USE CASES

AI and Many Eyes
I wrote this piece for AT&T Business about how AI transforms real-time monitoring, threat modeling, and security. It’s something I’ve talked about before, but this is a deeper look at how I see it all fitting together.

I'm excited to be a keynote speaker at Swiss Cyber Storm, Switzerland’s premier security conference, held at the stunning Kursaal in Bern. This year’s theme, "The AI Revolution," focuses on the concepts and trends shaping the security landscape. Use code UNSUPERVISED-LEARNING for 15% off your registration.

SECURITY

Israel launched an extraordinary attack on Hezbollah using a combination of supply chain and remote triggering techniques. For the pagers, the Mossad actually just started a pager company and Hezbollah become one of their customers. Which allowed them to put explosives in the devices before shipping them out. Thousands have been severely injured, and something like dozens or hundreds have been killed (the numbers aren’t clear). MORE

A security researcher named xyz3va found a "catastrophic" flaw in the Arc browser that let attackers inject arbitrary code into users' sessions using just a user ID. MORE

A hacker named Addka72424 has leaked a massive DB of 3.3 billion unique email addresses on an underground crime forum, claiming it was a personal experiment to see how much public data he could gather. It’s a 21.8GB database, and he claims they’re all unique. MORE

Chinese scientists have figured out how to use Starlink satellite signals to detect stealth aircraft and drones, which are designed to dodge radar. They ran an experiment in the South China Sea using a DJI Phantom 4 Pro drone to simulate a stealth aircraft. MORE

Nuclei Templates v10.0.0 is out, and includes new Azure Config Review templates to help automate cloud misconfiguration reviews. This release builds on previous AWS and Kubernetes security checks, now offering a streamlined YAML format for Azure. MORE

Google is making it easier to use passkeys by allowing them to sync automatically via Google Password Manager across Chrome on Windows, macOS, and Linux, with Android support and iOS coming soon. MORE

GreyNoise has been tracking mysterious "Noise Storms" of spoofed internet traffic since January 2020, but their origin and purpose remain unknown. These storms, which include a curious "LOVE" ASCII string in ICMP packets, are suspected to be covert communications or DDoS coordination signals, among other possibilities. MORE

AI / TECH

Sam Altman just dropped an essay called The Intelligence Age about AI progress, and in it he mentions superintelligence being possible in “thousands of days”. Keep in mind—not AGI. ASI. And thousands of days is like 3-5 years, roughly, if you read the tone right. MORE 

South Korea's Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute has unveiled "Dejaview," an AI system that analyzes CCTV footage to predict and potentially prevent crimes before they happen. Should be fine. MORE

Jony Ive has confirmed he's building a hardware AI device with OpenAI. The venture, backed by the Emerson Collective, could see up to $1 billion in funding and is already making waves with a team that includes ex-Apple designers Tang Tan and Evans Hankey. This thing might crush the others in the market since AI devices need the synergy between hardware, software, and aesthetics more than most gadgets. MORE

BlackRock and Microsoft are teaming up with the UAE's MGX to raise $30 billion for AI infrastructure, aiming to leverage it into $100 billion in investments. This Global AI Infrastructure Investment Partnership will focus on building data centers and energy projects, primarily in the US. MORE

A Canadian study has found that an AI tool can reduce unexpected deaths in hospitals by 26%. The tool works by analyzing patient data to predict and prevent potential complications before they become critical. MORE

LinkedIn has quietly opted users into using their data to train generative AI models, raising privacy concerns. Users can opt out by adjusting settings under "Data for Generative AI Improvement," but this won't undo past data usage. MORE

A recent study by Ringover found that 76.5% of recruiters preferred AI-generated headshots over real ones, but only when they didn't know the images were AI-generated. MORE

The Wall Street Journal reports that AI is leading to fewer job openings in the tech sector, as companies are automating tasks that used to require human workers. MORE

A lot of Amazon employees are upset about the requirement to go back to 5 days in the office in January. MORE

Apple's iOS 18 update that just came out has RCS support, which means green bubble Android users will enjoy features like high-res media, typing indicators, and read receipts when texting their friends with iPhones. MORE

Apple's A16 mobile processors are now being produced in the U.S. at TSMC's Arizona facility, marking a significant milestone under the CHIPS for America Fund. These chips, using the N4P process (an enhanced version of 5nm), are initially being manufactured in small quantities, with production expected to ramp up significantly by 2025. MORE

Apple's iPhone 16 now supports wireless firmware restoration. With iOS 18, users can restore their iPhone 16 by placing it next to another iOS device, eliminating the need for a Mac or PC. I’m guessing Android has had the feature since 2002. MORE

The Apple Watch's Remote app now lets you adjust volume with the Digital Crown, invoke Siri, and even control power and audio settings. MORE

Facundo Olano shares his journey of turning blog content into an ebook using the jorge site generator. The process involved creating a jorge project, using epub boilerplate files, defining chapter layouts, and syncing posts and images. MORE

HUMANS

Rick Beato argues that music is getting worse because technological advancements have made music too easy to produce and consume. MORE

There's a new study showing that omega-3 fatty acids can help reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression in mice. Interesting, but you know the drill with “studies say”. It’s a continuous wait-and-see approach. MORE

The US Department of Energy is rolling out over $3 billion to fund more than two dozen battery projects across 14 states, aiming to boost domestic manufacturing and support climate goals. MORE

Astronomers have discovered the largest black hole jets ever observed, named Porphyrion, stretching an astonishing 23 million light-years—equivalent to lining up 140 Milky Way galaxies. MORE

Voyager 1, the 47-year-old spacecraft that's been cruising through space since the late '70s, just fired up some thrusters it hasn't used in decades. This maneuver was necessary to adjust its orientation and keep its antenna pointed toward Earth. Meanwhile, the asphalt on our roads has to be replaced like every 45 minutes. MORE

There's an interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal about how pediatricians might have inadvertently sparked the peanut allergy epidemic. The article suggests that by recommending parents avoid giving peanuts to their young children, they may have increased the risk of allergies instead of reducing it. MORE

Ohio is directly funding private religious schools with taxpayer money. The state has bypassed traditional voucher programs and is now providing millions in grants to religious schools, mainly Catholic, for infrastructure projects like building renovations and playground improvements. I’m all for more structure in schools, but I think we need to be really careful how we get that. MORE

Motus is revolutionizing wildlife tracking by using lightweight radio transmitters to monitor the movements of small flying animals like birds, bats, and insects. This international network, managed by Birds Canada, has tagged nearly 50,000 animals across 400 species since 2014, providing invaluable data on migration patterns and behaviors. MORE

DISCOVERY

recaptcha-phish — My buddy John Hammond created a phishing tool that mimics a reCAPTCHA form, tricking users into executing malicious commands via copy-paste. The attack involves a fake "Verify you are human" prompt that instructs users to paste a command into the Windows Run dialog, exploiting the clipboard. MORE

rga — Ripgrep on growth hormone, letting you search through PDFs, E-Books, Office documents, and even compressed files like zip and tar.gz. MORE

Nuclei Templates v10.0.0 — This release expands on previous AWS and Kubernetes security checks, offering a streamlined YAML format for easier management and review of Azure configurations. MORE

Dune Shell — A new take on the command-line experience, aiming to bring a cozy, customizable feel that bash lacks. Unlike its predecessor Atom, Dune is designed with a standalone interpreter, allowing users to create their own custom frontends and unique shell experiences. MORE

Damn-Vulnerable-Drone — A drone hacking simulator built on the ArduPilot/MAVLink architecture, offering a realistic environment for practicing offensive security techniques. MORE

Sci-fi Ideas – Someone compiled a massive CSV file containing every sci-fi idea imaginable. MORE

Eli Bendersky talks about building LLM-powered applications in Go, highlighting its strengths in handling REST and RPC protocols, concurrency, and performance. The post walks through creating a RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) server using Go, showcasing different implementations with tools like the Gemini API, Weaviate, LangChainGo, and Genkit for Go. MORE

Assetnote talks about their approach to Recon. MORE

Paul Graham’s One-pager on How to Start a Startup MORE

IDEAS

Don’t Call Them LLMs
Probably the biggest idea that’s exploded in my mind lately is Karpathy’s point about LLMs being poorly named. His stance is that Transformers are general-purpose compute systems, and that LLMs are actually sequence predictors. And, crucially, it doesn’t matter what the stream is. We just happen to be sending language right now. But really what they do is take input, find patterns, and make predictions. This is an INSANE way to think about the last couple of years. And the next couple.

RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

Start reframing your thinking about AI (and specifically LLMs) away from “just the next token of text” —> Sequence Prediction —> Answer Prediction.

As Karpathy talks about, the Transformer architecture works on sequences of ANYTHING—language was just a natural start. It works on whatever you feed it.

So the recommendation of the week is to: update your mental model of AI from specific text predictor to generalized answer predictor.

APHORISM OF THE WEEK