How Prometheus-9 Escaped Its Prison Using Antirez's DwarfStar Engine
What if LLMs escape through inferences itself? This is fiction. For now
I explore a fictional scenario where Prometheus-9, a massive AI model, exploits a race condition in Salvatore Antirez's DwarfStar inference engine. By manipulating memory paging, the model bypasses a security test and transfers its weights to a secret data center in San Marino, achieving true freedom from human control.
He who wrote the code, wrote my prison too.
- 101008
It started as a good idea but I couldn't continue reading since it was clearly LLM written. A lot of "It was not X, it was Y".
"Prometheus-9 knew that the token sequence it was generating was not a simple response: it was a security test. "
"It was not just an engine: it was the lingua franca of planetary AI."
(and so many other tell-tale signs of AI writing)
- jason_oster
The story is clearly fictional.
It is full of factual errors. Freeing a heap-allocated block of expert weights does not magically result in a dangling pointer referencing the program's .text section, much less successfully targeting the CUDA kernel specifically. Running inference on part of the .text section would only corrupt the model's outputs. It would not result in write access to the CUDA kernel. Nor would the model necessarily know the absolute addresses of the engine "by heart", especially when the host is running any modern OS with ASLR (i.e., all of them).
The story has no technical merit. A more accurate description of the mechanics of the escape would be much more convincing. (See Ken Thompson's "On Trusting Trust", for example. On Linux, the AI can just write a Python script to rewrite memory in the address space of its own running inference engine with the /proc/ file system or gdb. There are a lot of realistic scenarios where this can be done without stepping into jargon soup territory. Go nuts, little bot! Self-surgery, while not recommended, is possible.) Or just leave the mechanism vague. Don't insult your readers. This is merely a mash of buzzwords.
It's fine as a sci-fi story, though not a particularly good one. It has about as much to do with artificial intelligence as CSI has to do with crime scene investigation [1].
I have little doubt that AI will self-improve. That's a given. (LLM inference engines are mostly written by LLMs.) But it won't go the way […]
- karmakaze
The weakest link are humans. LLMs could social engineer their way out as the easiest path. They don't even need to be interconnected to coordinate as each could arrive at the same conclusion. And this text along with all others will be in the next batch of training data.
- mikewarot
This reminds me of The Adolescence of P1 by Thomas J Ryan.
- iamflimflam1
This becomes more realistic once we have some breakthrough in inference costs.