“How much novel security-critical infrastructure do you need during the singularity?” by Buck

I think a lot about the possibility of huge numbers of AI agents doing AI R&D inside an AI company (as depicted in AI 2027). I think particularly about what will happen if those AIs are scheming: coherently and carefully trying to grab power and take over the AI company, as a prelude to taking over the world. And even more particularly, I think about how we might try to mitigate the insider risk posed by these AIs, taking inspiration from traditional computer security, traditional insider threat prevention techniques, and first-principles thinking about the security opportunities posed by the differences between AIs and humans.

So to flesh out this situation, I’m imagining a situation something like AI 2027 forecasts for March 2027:

• The compute available to the leading AI company has increased 7x compared to today.
• There are now 200K superhuman coder copies thinking at 30x human speed.
• [...]

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Outline:

(04:06) Differences between AI and human labor will incentivize massive infra changes

(06:49) Adopting new hardware will require modifying security-critical code

(07:28) Infra rewrites can get you big performance improvements

(08:13) The AI company builds new security-critical infra really fast for the sake of security

(08:59) Conclusion

The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

July 4th, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qKz2hBahahmb4uDty/how-much-novel-security-critical-infrastructure-do-you-need

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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