This is true: "Digital security has quietly rested on the fact that skilled attackers are rare and targets are nearly endless, so most systems were safe because no capable attacker ever got around to them." I am deeply concerned about all of the attacks becoming cheap at scale.

A retired NASA engineer who had worked on the Space Shuttle program for 25 years was hired by SpaceX at age 62. He described the first week as the most disorienting experience of his professional life. At NASA, a design change required 3 meetings, 2 committees, a review board, and 6 to 18 months of documentation. At SpaceX, his new supervisor said "if it works, build it. If it doesn't, change it by Friday." He sat at his desk after the first day and called his wife. He told her he felt like a man who had been swimming with ankle weights for 25 years and someone just cut them off. He could move. He could decide. He could build something in the morning and test it in the afternoon. The constraint that he had accepted as the nature of aerospace engineering turned out to be the nature of bureaucracy. Within 6 months he had contributed to more design iterations than he had completed in his last 5 years at NASA. Not because he was working harder. Because the time between having an idea and testing the idea collapsed from months to hours. The same brain. The same knowledge. A different operating system. He described a specific moment where he proposed a modification to a Raptor engine component. At NASA, the proposal would have entered a queue. At SpaceX, the modification was machined by the end of the day and tested by the following morning. He watched his idea become a physical object in 18 hours. At NASA, 18 hours would not have been enough to schedule the first meeting to discuss whether to schedule a meeting. He told an interviewer: "I didn't get smarter when I went to SpaceX. I got faster. The intelligence was always there. The system was in the way." The difference between SpaceX and NASA is not talent. NASA has extraordinary talent. The difference is the time between a thought and a test. SpaceX compresses it. NASA elongates it. The same engineer produces 10x more at SpaceX than at NASA because the bottleneck was never the engineer. It was the meetings about the meetings about the work.

In the immortal words of chief engineer John Ray Arnold in "Jurassic Park" :

Now that frontier AI is getting better than humans at reverse engineering binary code, finding vulnerabilities, exploiting and chaining them, and penetration testing, what should we be presenting at security conferences instead? This: defenses that scale across vuln classes.

@X @elonmusk I'm trying to report some security flaws I've found the only contact I've found was [email protected]. I've got the response that the email account [email protected] doesn't exist anymore or that it is no longer in use. How do I report you guys what I've found in Grok Bot?

I believe the exact opposite. LLMs can only use the tools that we provide them. The actual implementation is that the harness calls the tools when the LLM emits the "magic words." We haven't even solved universal alignment among all of us humans, how can we assume we can for AI?

this is a critically important moment for cyber defense with AI; there is not much time to act. we are happy if you want to work with us or any of our competitors or partners, but please take this moment seriously. only an urgent and intense collective response will work.