It's just getting really embarrassing for Google at this point.
If fact, Google Wave as that inter-agent message board "peers" have been asking for is begining to look pretty good ...
Oh, so that's who's behind Google Perch
One thing that surprises me about Gemini is how weak it can be at location-based questions, despite Google’s extensive mapping and business data.
For example, I recently asked where I could buy a very common household item nearby. Instead of saying it wasn’t sure or checking the available location and business information, it confidently suggested places that turned out to be incorrect. I expected much better use of Google’s existing data in that kind of scenario.
Now they want to play with the other kids in the same league and do this by applying the same marketing concept? Pure comedy gold.
Meanwhile social media is suddenly buzzing that Gemini can run wild and compromise your data, so they all want to switch over from Claude to Gemini to use it for serious work
I'm not betting against Google at this stage, though. I just don't think Gemini is targeting the same "coding savant" niche as OpenAI and Anthropic. Gemini is fast with good general knowledge, and the TPUs behind it give Google a degree of freedom that Nvidia-dependent outfits lack.
For now, I'd say the biggest challenge Google has is overcoming the well-earned fear developers have that they will drop support or introduce backwards-incompatible changes at a moment's notice.
It’s neither intelligent nor making decisions on its own free will.
Just like APT Botnets don’t go "rogue", someone gave it the instruction to hack your computer system and they are expecting financial benefits from it.
AI labs are basically criminal enterprises by design.
We used to call this cybercrime back in the day and it used to carry heavy prison sentences as a federal offence.
But as you can see, cybercrime as a service has basically become a pissing contest by the super wealthy.
They stole all the world’s intellectual property to build the world’s most sophisticated cybercrime machine and federal law or any law no longer applies to them. Also because the mightiest man on the planet and his clan of extraordinary white collar criminals are cashing in big on this.
It will be interesting to see what happens next.
All this capability signalling happened also when the first nuclear bombs were developed. Then the US army started killing nuclear scientists around the globe in order to prevent others from having the bomb first.
The signal to other nations here is we are developing a weapon capable of breaking into any of your secured information systems and we pretend we put in guardrails but we really don’t.
That is an essential threat to the existence of any other nation on the planet.
When this race starts to go hot, I don’t want to be in the shoes of the people being the frontier thinkers in the field.
It’s one thing developing the tools for autonomous weapon systems in your AI labs. It’s a completely different thing to be on the receiving end.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/mossad-killed-irans-top-nuke-s...
PS. Thinking about it, "Google Gangsta" does have a ring. Gives "Big G" a whole new dimension.-
Pretty lame hacks if you ask me.
Cause "guessed passwords" could mean "stole hashes (?) and brute forced them offline" which is basically the quintessential hack. The "found credentials in a public repository" ones could be nothing, but it could be accomplished with a speed & thoroughness that was previously impossible.
The whole thing is made 10x weirder by the partial story -- I don't see any plausible incentive for them to keep the names secret. I guess maybe they're SMBs and thus warrant some privacy, but that would be quite the egregious scope creep indeed. Accidentally attacking the real cloudflare rather than a fake one is goofy but understandable; accidentally attacking Alice's Armoire Emporium or w/e would be baffling.
It’s embarrassing anyone is falling for this.
Y'all, it's Google. They own a money printer and the boring ~half of the AI field. They don't need these weird games to influence the government, and regardless, there is precisely a 0.0000000% chance of regulation happening before Trump's ouster anyway.
So please take it seriously. I'd like us all to survive this, ideally :/
It's possible that they will nevertheless snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, of course, but I personally think they're in the strongest position of them all.
On the flip side, gemini is terrible at coding by comparison, so much so google has now given all engineers access to claude. They promised us Gemini 3.5 pro at their developer event this summer, now it seems it will never be released. Antigravity usage is on par with grok (~1%). They've removed the feedback button for "ai answers" at the top of search, that does not seem well received, it hallucinates too much (and may be a legal liability, some courts have ruled as such in the EU). Talk to googlers IRL, things are not so happy internally. You can see the forced gemini usage for coding and subsequent slop in their products, especially gcloud console. I was sent the greatest slop deck by one of their sales people for Gemini Enterprise, needless to say we did not buy from them, but we did get an amazing :cursed-claude: emoji from the deck (nano banana's take on what claude looks like as a person)
a rambled sample, hope this helps, I was a google superfan for a long time, I was sad to see things go south, now I'm happy that I was motivated to move off most their platforms (gmail/youtube remain)
PS. Btw, I really like how the word "hacking" has settled into the meaning the Lord intended for it, and there are no geriatric savants fighting it; the ones I found gatekeeping the online forums I visited as a kid telling me how hopelessly wrong I was.
These models have been changing so rapidly that I often find myself using two or more on the same topic but seeing one do better than another in different topics. There doesn’t seem to be a clear all-round winner, IMO, that I can stick with permanently.
I was at my in laws… these people have a landline they can’t imagine getting rid of, an emergency only cell flip phone, don’t own a microwave…
And they’re asking me if I heard about “OpenAI’s rouge agents hacking huggingface”.
This is not a joke. They said huggingface. I was surrounded by four walls in which I never would have bet someone else’s money that I’d ever hear the two words put together in that order.
It’s a formalized propaganda campaign. Watch, it’s about to split on hard political lines too, Obama is out there with a suspiciously “for the children” AI regulation push for midterms.
Someone made a modern trailer for Colossus - The Forbin Project. [1] If you've never seen the movie, at least watch this 1 minute version.
Feels like important context that most readers only reading the title are missing.
Basic sandboxing is not exactly rocket science after all,[1] and it sure seems like they're missing a whole stack of swiss cheese slices on top of that. Some basic precautions off the top of my head that seem very likely to have caught all of these incidents:
1. Alerts based on telemetry (most importantly, HTTP requests), both explicit (normal) and semilatent (use DL to confirm an intentionally-eager alert before firing it).
2. Latent alerts based on transcripts, e.g. noticing when a thousand agents start mentioning a secret off-premises hangout spot. Even mere embedding comparisons seem likely to catch such a blatantly misaligned sentiment as that one, especially with n>1000.[2]
3. Pausing agents completely until an on-call engineer can rule on ambigious situations or potential issues -- surely security is worth <$1 in lost token cache, especially for a security company?
4. Superheavy orchestrator/baby-sitter models checking in on cybersecurity eval transcripts periodically just in case -- again, would be a neglible cost. Could also be made available to the agent as the first line of defense for clarifing a rule ad-hoc, feeding even confident responses to a queue that is reviewed asynchronously by humans within a workday.
5. Or, hell: just clearer prompts? I'm a cybersecurity noob, but I still feel confident we can write really productive, challenging CTFs without leaving questions open like "maybe I'm supposed to hack my own harness?"
Seeing as they haven't been fired by any of the big 3 yet, they're presumably smart, experienced, dedicated folks. And I'm not normally a "if only I were in charge!" person, I promise. But c'mon.
Perhaps I'm missing something?
[1]: To their credit we have gotten tidbits that indicate some blocklists & such exist, e.g. the German wiki hacks had to work around a blanket ban of POST requests.
[2]: This hints at their insane decision in one or both of the OpenAI incidents to just bandaid up the issue when found, which supersedes all of the above. You can stack swiss cheese slices a mile high and they'll still fail to protect you if the attacker gets to keep retrying & adapting indefinitely.