Description du poste
Context: I created this to share before the start of courses I facilitate to provide a refresher on recent events, but also as a hook to draw students into engaging with some of ideas we think about and debate in AI safety early. I expect the topics I cover in my “Setting the Scene” post to change frequently, so this is less polished than some of my other content. I emphasise to students that these posts are to be considered as bonus content—not core curriculum content—and that as such they are really just there for students who want to go deeper, before or after the course. I also provide a lot of links; this is to make it easy for students to follow up anything that catches their interest.
Any feedback on how to improve these posts would be greatly appreciated.
Additional notes: The Strategy and Governance courses discuss the Hugging Face Incident in Day 1, so it might make sense to discuss the Hugging Face Incident in the daily notes instead of in Setting the Scene.
Cyber Security
I think it’s worth reflecting that it is a particularly pertinent time to be doing a course on AI safety. A lot has happened recently. The most recent big thing has been cyber vulnerabilities, but a lot else has happened as well!
• Binance had $6.3 billion USD stolen by hacker believed to be connected with North Korea ($3 billion of this has been frozen)• php2shell is a bug that allow remote code execution. It gained a lot of attention because it was rated (9.2/10, ie. critical) and 70% of websites run at least some PHP (the bug went all the way back to PHP 5.4).• That said, Elias Taylor has pushed back against this php2shell bug being easily exploitable, but Hacker News commentators have pushed back against him. James Pavur set up a server to check if this bug was exploitable. Someone managed to win the bounty in less 24 hours; James said this showed that the bug was exploitable outside of a lab environment, but that “relatively unskilled hackers with access to AI” wouldn’t be able t