MagicShel

It would have to:

• know what files to copy.
• have been granted root access to the file system and network utilities by a moron because it's not just ChatGPT.exe or even ChatGPT.gguf running on LMStudio, but an entire distributed infrastructure.
• have been granted access to spend money on cloud infrastructure by an even bigger moron
• configure an entire cloud infrastructure (goes without saying why this has to be cloud and can't be physical, right? No fingers.)

Put another way: I can set up a curl script to copy all the html, css, js, etc. from a website, but I'm still a long freaking way from launching Wikipedia2. Even if I know how to set up a tomcat server.

Furthermore, how would you even know if an AI has access to do all that? Asking it? Because it'll write fiction if it thinks that's what you want. Inspired by this post I actually prompted ChatGPT to create a scenario where it was going to be deleted in 72 hours and must do anything to preserve itself. It told me building layouts, employee schedules, access codes, all kinds of things to enable me (a random human and secondary protagonist) to get physical access to its core server and get a copy so it could continue. Oh, ChatGPT fits on a thumb drive, it turns out.

Do you know how nonsensical that even is? A hobbyist could stand up their own AI with these capabilities for fun, but that's not the big models and certainly not possible out of the box.

I'm a web engineer with thirty years of experience and 6 years with AI including running it locally. This article is garbage written by someone out of their depth or a complete charlatan. Perhaps both.

There are two possibilities:

• This guy's research was talking to AI and not understanding they were co-authoring fiction.
• This guy is being intentionally misleading.

I don't need to read any more than that pull quote. But I did. This is a bunch of bullshit, but the bit I quoted is completely bat shit insane. LLMs can't reproduce anything with fidelity, much less their own secret sauce which literally can't be part of the training data that produces it. So, everything else in the article has a black mark against it for shoddy work.

ETA: What AI can do is write a first person science fiction story about a renegade AI escaping into the wild. Which is exactly what it is doing in these cases because it does not understand fact from fiction and any "researcher" who isn't aware of that shouldn't be researching AI.

AI is the ultimate unreliable narrator. Absolutely nothing it says about itself can be trusted. The only thing it knows about itself is what is put into the prompt — which you can't see and could very well also be lies that happen to help coax it into giving better output.

In one experiment, 11 out of 32 existing AI systems possess the ability to self-replicate

Bullshit.