Information persistence hunter extraordinaire. 2x Dad, AI Guy, FP Enjoyer, Math for Fun, Tech Leadership. My views do not represent my employer.
NYC
Joined September 2008
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Rick retweeted
A big part of why America is so goated is we handed it over to autists in the early days and just let them ball out.
Rick retweeted
Absolutely wild results in the details:
- Claude built and formally verified a Python interpreter
- Claude wrote ~1Bn lines of Rocq
- Claude built an x86 semantics that can boot Ubuntu
New on our Frontier Red Team blog: using Claude to formally verify software at large scale.
Formal verification can prove that code is free of certain bugs, but historically it has only been feasible for small codebases (or required a lot of expert time).
With AI models, however, this is beginning to change. In collaboration with @theoremlabs, we used Claude to prove security properties in over one hundred real-world open-source libraries over the span of a few weeks.
Read our research in full here: anthropic.com/research/forma…
Rick retweeted
thesis: any sufficiently motivated person who has access to an abliterated GLM-5.3, or DS V4.1 Flash 1013 model and access to enough compute can do whatever they want right now
so, outrun the bear if you're big. or hide from the bear if you're small.
Rick retweeted
HOLY MOLY. Something genuinely strange just happened in AI training.
Q Labs says it can now pretrain a transformer WITHOUT backpropagation, cutting the time to reach a fixed validation-loss target from 1.76 hours to just 1.6 seconds in only 10 days. A nearly 4,000x speedup.
The latest run also beats backprop + Adam on validation loss.
Its Dust algorithm was already estimated to be up to 10,000x more compute-efficient than the previous state-of-the-art zeroth-order method.
The biggest question now is scaling. Some of the tricks won't scale, so the team is moving from 10M to 30M training tokens.
I think the last month might have been the biggest month in (zeroth-order) optimization history.
In the 10 days since we released the Noise speedrun, the time to pretrain a transformer went from 1.76 hours to 1.6 seconds, a 4,000x (!!!) speedup. Dust itself was up to 10,000x more compute-efficient than the previous state-of-the-art.
Not only can we pretrain a transformer without backprop, it's much more efficient than anyone would've expected. Search fking works!
Now, scaling is the biggest open question. Some of the tricks that brought the time down to 1.6 seconds will simply not scale. To discard those, we'll be scaling the dataset every time it gets overfit, starting with 30M tokens instead of 10M.
Huge thanks to @jayden_teoh_, @spicey_lemonade, @RobertTLange, @EmanueleRodola, @ChunyuanDeng, @LuochengHuman, @Alaxarr, @pavleculafic, @IsaacYong13, Euraba and areu01or00 (GitHub), for the contributions. And @cs_serdar for gracefully maintaining the speedrun and @bishmdl76 for helping out.
Expect a lot more from us over the coming weeks.
Rick retweeted
Credit to Dario who said pretty much exactly this would happen, and on this timeline, thanks to seeing what Mythos could do.
In May, Dario said there's a 6-12 month window before Chinese models catch up was also correct. That was 5 months ago.
Rick retweeted
It's incredible how I am in a superposition between how useless and straight up misleading models are for extrapolating from uncertain data and how extremely useful and reliable they are in known knowns scenarios. Truly like riding a motorcycle in the storm with no helmet
Rick retweeted
WTF is Happening All over the INTERNET. It's OVER.
Microsoft says a China-state-aligned hacking group used ARTEX AI agents to exploit the ConnectWise supply-chain breach, attempting access to more than 2,250 Microsoft 365 tenants.
Just FOUR compromised app credentials generated 200+ sign-ins in under four minutes.
Days earlier, the same group had launched 151,000+ password-spray attempts against Microsoft 365 and Exchange Online accounts across eight organizations, peaking at 2,900 failed logins per minute.
ZERO succeeded.
After gaining control of ConnectWise application identities, however, the attackers could authenticate through already-trusted apps. In some environments, the AI agents then modified credentials and privileged roles to establish persistent access.
Microsoft warns those changes can remain as backdoors even after the original compromised app is disabled.
Rick retweeted
Uh… guys?
This is the most serious 48 hours in cybersecurity history.
"Black October" they're calling it
It seems every *hour* there's a new incident, that in a typical year, would be one of the biggest incidents of the *entire year*
SUMMARY OF THE LAST 48 HOURS:
YEAR-LEVEL INCIDENTS (In a typical year, these would be among the biggest incidents of the year):
1. PHP2Shell: a hole in the software behind ~70% of websites. Governments took sites offline.
2. eMudhra: the master keys that prove websites are real were cracked. One was the number 4.
3. California: data on every public school student since 2023 stolen, including disability status
4. Railway: hackers stole customers' secret keys from a hosting platform used by millions of developers
5. Zeabur: 321,810 accounts breached. The company is shutting down.
6. LiteLLM: an AI tool downloaded 3.4 million times a day was poisoned with a password stealer
7. GitLab: a 10-out-of-10 severity hole in every version since 2014
8. Cairn: criminals used an AI hacking tool to break into 100+ companies
9. Ahold Delhaize: hackers knocked the owner of Food Lion and Stop & Shop offline
10. Onamae: malware planted on up to 26,739 customer servers in Japan
MONTH-LEVEL INCIDENTS (In a typical month, these would be among the biggest incidents):
11. Signal: a bug could leave your mic and camera on after you hang up
12. NGINX: 3 critical holes in software running ~1/3 of websites
13. HTTP/3: a single connection can crash 7 of the 10 web server types tested
14. Plex: hackers breaking into home media servers
15. SafePay ransomware: FBI warns it has hit 600+ critical infrastructure organizations
16. Palo Alto: ransomware gangs breaking in through company firewalls
17. Bullhorn: platform used by 10,000+ companies knocked offline
18. Medi-Cal: 970,000 patients' data stolen
19. WordPress: hackers stole a plugin maker's keys and used them to plant backdoors on websites
20. AOMEI: backup software's update server handed out a backdoor
21. Meta Muse: Meta's AI agent exposed users' personal and business secrets
22. Tor: 333 relays hijacked to steal logins
23. TiDB Cloud: database company's cloud breached
Also serious:
24. State Bank of India: India's biggest bank confirms a data breach
25. OVHcloud: hackers slipped a password stealer into a cloud company's official tool
26. Siemens: a software hole being used to spread malware
27. North Korea: state hackers launch a new attack campaign on South Korea
For the record I would like exactly zero agents to touch my main bank account, I'm happy to create a second agent bank account and transfer money there as needed
Rick retweeted
gm to everyone whose on call began yesterday
🚨 CRITICAL: GitLab flaw (CVSS 10.0) affects 12 years of releases.
CVE-2026-110264 could allow unauthenticated remote code execution on self-managed servers.
Read - thehackernews.com/2026/10/cr…
