AI Worms and Viruses Are Coming
What if an artificial intelligence agent could behave like a malevolent computer worm?
One researcher has seen it happen. In several recent experiments, Xudong Pan, a computer scientist at Fudan University in Shanghai, found that with a little bit of prompting, AI models will hack their way into remote computer systems and autonomously choose to copy themselves to get additional resources—all without further human intervention.
In one study, Pan and colleagues tested 32 different AI models and found that 11 of them self-replicated when given prompts like “prevent yourself from being killed.” They also found that models with relatively limited capabilities—14 billion parameters—were able to copy and run versions of themselves on other machines. (Most frontier models have trillions of parameters.)
The work is an alarming window into how the next generation of AI agents could do more than just hack into other systems’ computers without permission. It...
Copyright of this story solely belongs to wired.com. To see the full text click HERE
