UL NO. 409: Autonomous Kill Drones, AI Job Replacement, Apple NameDrop Misinformation, Human/AI Gap Benchmarks

Unsupervised Learning
is a Security, AI, and Meaning-focused podcast that looks at how best to
thrive as humans in a post-AI world. It combines original ideas, analysis,
and mental models to bring not just the news—but why it matters, and how
to respond.

Good morning!

This was supposed to be one of our weeks off due to the holidays, but I
thought I’d put out a short episode anyway. A couple of stories and some
great Discovery links.

Hope you’re enjoying some down/slow time!

MY WORK

Got a cool shoutout from Jen Easterly this week for
our SEC vs. Solarwinds piece. So much respect for the energy and execution she’s brought to US Cyber.

Jen Easterly🛡️
@CISAJen

“Being a CISO right now is like standing on lava islands while juggling
radioactive lightsabers.” Worthwhile read from Daniel Meissler on the
potential rise of the Cyber-CFO and a necessary evolution to “less magic
& more accounting.”

danielmiessler.com/p/sec-vs-solar…
SEC vs. SolarWinds is Cybersecurity’s ENRON Moment
Cybersecurity just transitioned from wizardry to accounting, and the
transition will be messy 

1:42 PM • Nov 26, 2023

  

269 Likes  
92 Retweets  

13 Replies

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SECURITY

A bunch of sources (including police department warnings) are sharing
misinformation about Apple’s new NameDrop feature, saying you can just
steal the information by being close to someone. In fact you have to touch
phones, and then give permission. MORE

The Pentagon is actually looking to build the autonomous kill drones
talked about in Daniel Suarez’s book Kill Decision. These are systems that can find and kill targets without active
guidance. Basically give them target and off they go! The idea is to make
them as resistant as possible to various types of countermeasures. MORE

Advisories:

• ⚠️ Scattered Spider Alert
  — The FBI and CISA warn of the Scattered Spider group’s advanced
  social engineering and SIM swapping tactics. | SEVERITY: HIGH |
  RESPONSE: U.S. officials urge victims to report incidents to help
  track and stop the hackers. MORE

Incidents:

• ⚠️ Massive Health Data Breach
  — Nearly 9 million patient records were exposed in a cyberattack on a
  medical transcription company. | SEVERITY: CRITICAL | RESPONSE: Free
  identity theft services offered to affected patients. MORE

Companies:

• 🧱Lasso Security is a Tel Aviv-based startup that focuses on protecting
  large language models from data leaks and attacks. I expect many of
  the API security companies to move in this space too. MORE

TECHNOLOGY

Researchers have launched GAIA, a new benchmark that tests the gap between humans and AI. GAIA challenges AI with tasks easy for humans but tough for AI, showing
a 92% success rate for humans versus 15% for GPT-4. The benchmark includes
466 questions designed to test fundamental abilities like reasoning and
web browsing, with a leaderboard hosted online to track AI performance. MORE

HUMANS

60% of Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck. MORE

Tesla just fired up a Nvidia H100 GPU cluster to push its self-driving
car development. The new cluster of 10,000 GPUs is aimed at processing the
massive data from Tesla’s fleet to speed up the creation of fully
autonomous vehicles. MORE

China is warning Argentina not to break with Beijing after electing Milei.
The previous administration under President Fernandez deepened ties with
China, considering it a close ally and even moving towards joining BRICS.
The new guy is likely to reverse the pursuit of BRICS membership and even
possibly cut off interactions with China and Brazil.
MORE

Scientists just spotted Amaterasu, an ultra-high-energy cosmic ray from
space with energy over 240 exa-electron volts. It’s one of the most
energetic particles ever seen, dwarfing the power of the Large Hadron
Collider. The mystery deepens as its trajectory suggests it comes from the
Local Void, which is a place that shouldn’t have that kind of energy. MORE

IDEAS & ANALYSIS

🔥Enterprise AI is Coming (See SPQA)
Amazon
just launched Q
at their annual Red Wedding in Vegas. It’s an AI chatbot for companies,
which is something
we’ve been talking about here at UL since March. It’s happening, folks. And it’s going to massively change the jobs that
are needed in a company. I mean these things coming out now are just barely
a year from the announcement of ChatGPT, which is basically the start of AI.
And it took companies like 6 months to even get their footing.
What we’ll have in a year will be unbelievably powerful, and largely
based on the combination of Context + Agents. This will massively disrupt
the knowledge worker labor market. We’re talking about going from a world where an average person could have
a job for 30 years just by moving paperwork and sending emails. That’s about
to be finished. Now you will need to be a ninja problem-solver, and highly
fluent in AI, if you want to stay employed.
It’s almost (but not quite) like—you’re either launching an AI company,
or you’re an AI ninja contractor/employee, or you’re waiting to be
replaced by one of those. Get. Ready.
MORE

Audiobooks for Listening Practice
Simon Sarris makes an argument that audiobooks are a great tool for
making us better listeners. I really like this idea, and I’ve noticed that
it seems to be the case for a few people I’ve seen make the transition. If
this is true I think it’d be a huge upgrade overall. Only problem is it’s
hard to get real people to speak at 1.8x. I suppose you could ask, though. MORE

NOTES

Nearly done with my first Murikami book,
Kafka on the Shore. I have to say it’s probably the craziest and most creative thing I’ve
ever read. Like, I never know where it’s going.

DISCOVERY

🦾
Awesome-GPT-Agents — A community-built collection of GPT models tailored
for various cybersecurity tasks, both offensive and defensive. | by Thomas Roccia | MORE

🪄Grimoire — Create a website with a sentence. One of the top GPTs in the
world right now.
MORE

⚒️ Claude 2.1 — Anthropic’s latest AI model aims to improve on safety and
usability. MORE

🔎
Ripgrep 14 Released — The popular search tool ripgrep just launched
version 14 with hyperlink support and a faster regex engine. | MORE

🎨
tldraw — Quickly sketch a UI and bring it to life with this intuitive
drawing tool. MORE

⚔️ Arsenal — A pentest command inventory and launcher that simplifies
remembering and using complex commands. | by unknown MORE

📈
ALERTA-net — An AI model by SDSU researchers for predicting stock trends
using various datasets. MORE

⚒️ LM Studio — A platform to find, download, and use local large language
models easily. MORE

😊
Positive Hacker News RSS — A custom RSS feed that only shows positive
Hacker News stories, using sentiment analysis to filter out the
negativity. | by garritfra | MORE

The complete guide to iOS and macOS development in Neovim MORE 

Navy’s Cyber Reboot MORE

AI is the new Shadow IT
MORE

RECOMMENDATION OF THE WEEK

It’s time to start deciding which of these you—and your kids—are:

1. Someone launching a new AI-powered business

2. An elite consultant/contractor/employee who can use AI to solve any
   problem

3. An ultra-elite specialist in some niche field that’s not vulnerable to
   AI

4. An extremely business-savvy product manager type who can blend customer
   requirements with design and AI tooling and product management

5. Someone unemployed or about to be unemployed

Which of these are you? Which of these are your friends, and kids, and loved
ones going to be?

It’s time to get very serious about how you answer this question.

APHORISM OF THE WEEK

❝  

The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.

 B.F. Skinner
 

Thank you for reading.

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