[alecco]

> Why wouldn't it be a Skynet? One runaway Mythos might just hack all other data centers, take over the Figure AI bots and autonomous drones to protect itself from shutdown.

Because the real world is not a Hollywood movie. An LLM could try to do something along the lines if either it gets fine-tuned to do it, or somebody instructs it to do it.

I see extremely more likely a small group of humans using a powerful LLM to "take over" critical parts of the world economy. But it wouldn't be like pressing a button. I'm talking of NSA/CIA/Pentagon/Wall St. kind of evil people. And I bet they would do it surreptitiously.

[api]

Something like your takeover scenario already happened, but not through AI. It happened through atomic weapons.

Nations who have them are in a different class from nations who don’t. Nations who have a lot of them, delivery systems, and systems that might be able to shoot down some of a counterattack are superpowers.

Using this leverage these nations and their leaders have been able to dictate world policies. Through the last half of the 20th century this was the US and the USSR. Now it’s the US, EU, Russia, and China, and a few smaller nations with a few nukes. The club is a little bigger but not much.

This kind of thing could happen in the 21st century with AI. If so it will probably be the US and China who control the most powerful AI “agency amplifiers.”

[NitpickLawyer]

>> One runaway Mythos might just hack all other data centers

> Because the real world is not a Hollywood movie.

One interesting thought experiment that I like to do is think about how many years you have to go back for this to be true. In this particular scenario, I think ~25 years is pretty much the sweet spot.

The Internet was beginning to take shape in the late 90s, early 2000s, and security was just beginning to be taken seriously, but it was still nascent. In that timeframe we had the first worms starting to appear, we had slammer, we had blaster, ssh had lots of exploits and so on.

It's not really far-fetched that a mythos equivalent "unit", working in the 2000s could really "take over the world". Especially one without the "safety" tuning. The Internet was really ripe for this in that timeframe, security wasn't up to par, and employing advance techniques that came later (in memory payloads, rootkits, etc) could make it pseudo-invisible to that era's detection tech. (reminder that traces of blaster were found on computers from a nuclear powerplant at that time).

The only question is would the trend continue? Meaning would a ~2050s "mythos" equivalent be able to do today what the one we have today could do in the 2000s. And if true, would that capability come before the 2050s? Could this be reached sooner, with say a dedicated offline DC somewhere where "mythos" could bang its tokens against the network and learn to exploit everything we have today, faster than 25 years? That's probably a bit of a stretch, but maybe not "hollywood" far fetched...

[sometimelurker]

> An LLM could try to do something along the lines if either it gets fine-tuned to do it, or somebody instructs it to do it.

long horizon RL teaches LLMs behaviors that incentize power-seeking and lying and other unethical actions to achieve goals. the reason anthropic is winning right now is because they are the most openly worried about this and the best AI engineers understand this to be an issue and care about it.

https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/WewsByywWNhX9rtwi/curre... <- actually worth reading https://www.forbes.com/sites/boazsobrado/2026/03/11/alibabas... <- more of a source than anything