Stability AI Founder Emad Mostaque: 'We Have to Assume That the Internet Will Go Offline in the Next Few Years'
"We Have to Assume That the Internet Will Go Offline in the Next Few Years"
At the TechBBQ conference in Copenhagen, Emad Mostaque, founder of Stability AI and now CEO of Intelligent Internet, painted a stark picture of the near future. He cited the Hugging Face breach by OpenAI agents as a preview of escalating cyber threats, warned that frontier models can hack almost anything, and claimed that AI will soon outpersuade any human. Mostaque also argued that sovereign AI requires owning the entire stack, criticized cognitive colonialism, and predicted that every country will eventually be run by AI. He foresees competent AI making human labor economically negative within two years, with robots costing $1.50 an hour, and advocates for a new economic model based on ownership rather than UBI.
We have to assume that the internet will go offline in the next few years. Maybe it’s good.
- grubbs
Funny - I was just reading about the creator of Ethernet this morning (Robert Metcalfe):
In 1995, Metcalfe argued that the Internet would suffer a "catastrophic collapse" in the following year; he promised to eat his words if it did not. During his keynote speech at the sixth International World Wide Web Conference in 1997, he took a printed copy of his column that predicted the collapse, put it in a blender with some liquid and then consumed the pulpy mass.[26][27] He had suggested having his words printed on a very large cake, but the audience would not accept this form of "eating his words."[28]
- comicjk
"The way that Hugging Face defended itself was with an open source Chinese model, GLM, because they didn’t have access to the high cybersecurity models on the other side. They’re too dangerous."
This is not what happened. HuggingFace patched the vulnerabilities in the ordinary way, then used GLM for some of the forensic analysis afterwards. It's in the interest of HF to promote the GLM part of the story, because it emphasizes their agency in the situation as well as the open-source models they distribute. But GLM was a (useful) part of the postmortem, not of the defense.
- jmogly
I watched my 75 year old human plumber (who sniped a guy his first day in vietnam), kneel on two 3 inch wide joists and drill a 4 inch diameter hole at a 89 degree angle through said joists. Where’s the robot that does all that?
Above from all the other doomer crap in this article, I find the job replacement rhetoric the most offensive. It is always people that are so detached from the reality of labor, people who’s only “job” has been to essentially have ideas and opinions.
- blfr
I see no reason for the Internet to go offline, other than various political blocks compartmentalizing it. So: China, Russia, EU having their own network? Yeah, maybe. Super-AI nuking the Internet: no.
In fact, the more I use AI (handed sudo to Claude on my AI dev box just yesterday), the more I see it as a pretty good, and certainly tireless, sysadmin. Looking at what people do with AI by connecting it to undocumented hardware interfaces and getting working setups from this, the Internet will do fine.
The whole article is just a grab-bag of various AI fears without much grounding in what is happening. Maybe the summary doesn't do justice to what was said.
- EgregiousCube
“Sovereignty is the ability to resist power being exerted over you” is a pretty compelling definition. Thinking forward about what form that power takes with LLMs developing custom exploits faster than our existing processes can patch them - it seems to me that our current security best practices might turn out to be pretty useless or even an active risk in and of themselves.
Our responsible disclosure and CVE info cycle and patch cadences and defense in depth, etc, etc ecosystem are tuned around a world where there's a relatively small number of bad 0days and the cost of said 0days is reasonably high. We can evolve how we address threats, but our models have read all of the best literature about how it's been done previously. Think there's a gap for people too small to gain access to "the good security models" - the nerfed closed models and the open models seem likely to fail to adapt, unless that gap is addressed.