[jsty]

> In the professional intel community they have been talking about this as a general problem for at least a decade now.

As in they've been discussing detecting clandestine AI labs? Or just how almost no activity is now in principle undetectable?

[mdhb]

I’m referring to the wider issue of what’s referred to by the Americans as “ubiquitous technical surveillance” where they came to the kind of upsetting conclusion for them that they had a long time ago lost the ability to even operate in London without the Brits knowing.

I don't think there’s a good public understanding of just how much things have changed in that space in the last decade but a huge percentage of all existing tradecraft had to be completely scrapped because not only does it not work anymore but it will put you on the enemy’s radar very early on and is actively dangerous.

It’s also why I think a lot of advice I see targeted towards activist types I think is straight up a bad idea in 2025. It just typically involves a lot of things that aren’t really consistent with any kind of credible innocuous explanation and are very unusual which make you stand out from a crowd.

[snickerbockers]

But does that apply to other countries that are operating within their own territory? China is generally the go-to 'boogeyman' when people are talking about the dangers of AI; they are intelligent and extremely industrialized, and have a history of antagonistic relationships with 'the west'. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that they will eventually have the capability to design and produce their own GPUs capable of competing with the best of NV and AMD; how will the rest of the world know if China is producing a new AI that violates a hypothetical 'AI non-proliferation treaty'?

Interesting semi-irrelevant tangent: the Cooley/Tukey 'Fast Fourier Transform' algorithm was initially created because they were negotiating arms control treaties with the Russians, but in order for that to be enforceable they needed a way to detect nuclear weapons testing; the solution was to use seismograms to detect the tremors caused by an underground nuclear detonation, and the FFT was invented in the process because they were using computers to filter for the types of tremors created by a nuclear weapon.

[mdhb]

I’m actually in agreement with you here. I think it’s probably reasonable to assume that through some kind of combination of home grown talent and their prolific IP theft programs that they are going to end up with that capability at some point the only thing in debate here is the timeline.

As I understand things (I’m not actually a professional here) the current thinking has up to this point been something akin to a containment strategy largely based on lessons learned from years of nuclear non-proliferation work.

But things are developing at such a crazy pace and there are some major differences between this and nuclear technology that it’s not really a straightforward copy and paste strategy at all. For example this time around a huge amount of the research comes from the commercial sector completely independently of defense and is also open source.

Also thanks for that anecdote I hadn’t heard of that before. This is a bit of a long shot but maybe you might know, I was trying to think of some research that came out maybe 2-3 years ago that basically had the ability to remotely detect if anything in a room had been moved (I might be misremembering this slightly) and it was said to be potentially a big breakthrough for nuclear arms control. I can’t remember what the hell it was called or anything else about it, do you happen to know?

[dmurray]

The last one sounds like this: A zero-knowledge protocol for nuclear warhead verification [0].

Sadly, I don't think this is actually helpful for nuclear arms control. I suppose you could imagine a case where a country is known to have enough nuclear material for exactly X warheads, hasn't acquired more, and it could prove to an inspector that all of the material is still inside the same devices it was in at the last inspection. But most weapons development happens by building new bombs, not repurposing old ones, and most countries don't have exactly X bombs, they have either 0 or so many the armed forces can't reliably count them.

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature13457

[mdhb]

I don’t think this is actually the one I had in mind but it’s an interesting concept all the same. Thanks for the link.