The jury found that Ding stole trade secrets relating to the hardware infrastructure and software platforms that allow Google’s supercomputing data center to train and serve large AI models. The trade secrets contained detailed information about the architecture and functionality of Google’s custom Tensor Processing Unit chips and systems and Google’s Graphics Processing Unit systems, the software that allows the chips to communicate and execute tasks, and the software that orchestrates thousands of chips into a supercomputer capable of training and executing cutting-edge AI workloads. The trade secrets also pertained to Google’s custom-designed SmartNIC, a type of network interface card used to facilitate high speed communication within Google’s AI supercomputers and cloud networking products.
Neat experiment that gives a mechanistic interpretation of temperature. I liked the reference to the "anomalous" tokens being near the centroid, and thus having very little "meaning" to the LLM.
I have actually had pizza at the Pentagon. True, it was almost 30 years ago, and it tasted like federal-cafeteria pizza, but it was edible and I'm still alive.
I doubt that's it. Artificial demand just adds noise to the signal, it doesn't eliminate it. It seems more likely that they've just decided that knowing the Pentagon is working on something without additional details isn't a very useful signal for adversaries.
I was about to make this same comment - this data might've been more useful for say, the soviets, when they were the only major threat that the US was actively dealing with, so they could have some guarantee that if they spotted a ton of pizzas being ordered to the pentagon, they could be fairly sure it would be something to relevant to them.
One of the examples was the night before the '91 Desert Storm started. For those that weren't around, there was a huge build up operation called Desert Shield and only became Desert Storm when they started shooting. It's not like that was a secret, and the Iraqis could have seen this data and not be surprised when the bombs start falling immediately after the pizza surge.
If you were bin Laden, maybe you might not have been caught unawares helicopters were about to crash in your garden. It's not like you didn't know they were looking for you.
I can't think of someone that the Pentagon or other agencies that this applies to that their adversaries would not know they were the adversary. This might be more relevant than you might think
Plus when it’s time to go Mutually Assured Destruction, ie to those capable of attacking the US mainland, I’m going to assume they would be doing all this from whatever the successor to Mt Weather is.
Great article and nice explanation. I believe this describes “Algorithm R” in this paper from Vitter, who was probably the first to describe it: https://www.cs.umd.edu/~samir/498/vitter.pdf
That paper says “Algorithm R (which is a reservoir algorithm due to Alan Waterman)” but it doesn’t have a citation. Vitter’s previous paper https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/358105.893 cites Knuth TAOCP vol 2. Knuth doesn’t have a citation.
Knuth also says that "Algorithm R is due to Alan G. Waterman", on TAOCP vol 2 page 144, just below "Algorithm R (Reservoir sampling)". This blog post seems to be a good history of the algorithm: https://markkm.com/blog/reservoir-sampling/ (it was given by Waterman in a letter to Knuth, as an improvement of Knuth's earlier "reservoir sampling" from the first edition).
> All in all, Algorithm R was known to Knuth and Waterman by 1975, and to a wider audience by 1981, when the second edition of The Art of Computer Programming volume 2 was published.
Elseforum, I've debated this. I consider it to be more of an inside company lobbying group than a union. In particular, they have no ability to collectively bargain for a contract. None of their wins are things that have been able to be put into a contract.
Furthermore, some of the issues they've brought up have been things that are... not contractural and rather political. For example https://www.alphabetworkersunion.org/press/ceasefire-demand ... while it is ok for an organization to have opinions, things that are not about the contract that the worker has with the company gets into... well... political issues and that can hinder the ability for the group to get a majority representation and be able to do the things with contracts.
When subtlety proves too constraining, competitors may escalate to overt cyberattacks, targeting datacenter chip-cooling systems or nearby power plants in a way that directly—if visibly—disrupts development. Should these measures falter, some leaders may contemplate kinetic attacks on datacenters, arguing that allowing one actor to risk dominating or destroying the world are graver dangers, though kinetic attacks are likely unnecessary. Finally, under dire circumstances, states may resort to broader hostilities by climbing up existing escalation ladders or threatening non-AI assets. We refer to attacks against rival AI projects as "maiming attacks."
A lot of my teenage years were spent building and playing with PCs and a lot of the knowledge and interest came from reading each and every issue of boot and maximum pc
Jumping into an unknown codebase (which may be a library you depend on) and being able to quickly investigate, debug, and root cause an issue is an extremely invaluable skill in my experience
Acting as if this isn’t useful in the real world won’t help. The real world is messy, documentation is often missing or unreliable, and the person/team who wrote the original code might not be around anymore.
