Either I have wrong mental model or then too many other people have wrong mental model.

For LLM to self-replicated it would need to first hack itself. Or the platform it runs on it. That is fully extract the model and then upload it to be run somewhere else.

As I have understood how they work is that you have LLM interference running somewhere with loaded model. And you input data there and then read outputs. Then some code runs that output and inputs following output from running it.

Meaning that to self replicate actually just running that output somewhere else is not enough. You need to lift the whole model to run somewhere else too...

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xg15 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Exactly. But even if the model got access to its own weights, it would need to find a machine with a sufficiently capable GPU, transfer the weights and install itself there. Basically, the only machines powerful enough that AIs could self-replicate to would be other AI datacenters.

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cdaringe 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s not even hack though. I have my model and agent self modify its running parameters, thus self service, on commodity hardware. I have it run other models and other software. there is agent model autonomy here, and it’s not even complicated. A harness is kilobytes, a model is gigabytes, and networks are abundant. Moving the pieces is easy and cheap.

With these properties alone the virus like replication of intelligent actors isn’t hard to imagine at all.

	▲	xg15 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> a model is gigabytes Maybe in the future, but right now, in my understanding, we have two things: - frontier models, which might be smart enough to self-replicate, but are also far larger than a few GB and need enormous amounts of VRAM to operate at any reasonable speed. - local models which can run on your mac or high-end gaming PC, but which are simply too dumb to self-replicate (without being explicitly instructed to do so). I don't think we have something that is both small enough and smart enough to operate like a virus yet. (Edit: well, there is a third option: A frontier model could replicate itself on a CPU machine, ditch the VRAM and just accept that the replicants will be r e a l l y r e a l l y s l o w. That would be sort of hilarious, but maybe not completely harmless if the replication stays undetected and they could keep spreading. It would be a "smoldering ember" kind of situation - and a million machines each running at 0.001 tok/s is still 10.000 tok/s as a whole.)

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Sharlin 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

These agents run in a harness that basically runs them in a loop. It's just software.

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buellerbueller 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

since when is moving 1s and 0s difficult?

	▲	BobaFloutist an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If the evil AI wants to take over the world one thought every 18 months at at time on my consumer laptop, the fan whirring and the laptop refusing to do anything else the whole time, it's welcome to try.
	▲	gensym 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Someone's never met the Windows File Copy dialog.
	▲	svachalek 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		We're not talking about a 6k virus file though. More like 10 terabytes and it needs a server that can pack all that into VRAM.
	▲	fitblipper an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Since those 1s and 0s became heavy enough to cause a global shortage of memory and GPUs.