$1.4b Stolen But Sam Altman Warns Of Worse: “World-Shaking Cyberattack” From AI

For the CEO of maybe the biggest AI company in the world right, Sam Altman sure doesn’t seem to have much positive to say about AI all the time.

Maybe it’s just to grab headlines (shit it’s working) but Saltman’s always going off on some sensationalist warning about the dangers of AI. Errrr… wait, isn’t that the product that you’re selling?

Maybe it’s a tactic, like, it builds on the mystique of how powerful these broken calculators are. Or another tactic is that it’s a straight up threat. Like, “Ohhh, these things are pretty dangerous, better pay us more to make sure that they’re safe…” “Oh yeah, this AI comes with a ‘won’t murder everyone function’ but that’s only on the premium tier plan…”

Because that certainly seems to be the approach with Nostradamus-Altman’s latest prophecy.

In a recent interview with Axios, Altman said, “We’re not that far away from a world where there are incredibly capable open-source models that are very good at biology,” he said. “The need for society to be resilient to terrorist groups using these models to try to create novel pathogens is no longer a theoretical thing.”

And to avoid this “world-shaking cyberattack” would require a “tremendous amount of work.” Aaaand there it is. Man, everything really is just an advert, isn’t it? (Make sure to visit Wall Street Memes Casino whilst you’re here!)

I mean, he has a point. Last year over $1.4 billion dollars of money in crypto was stolen from crypto industries in cyberattacks last over (crypto).

And things are potentially only going to get worse. Idk if you saw this but there was a story recently saying that quantum computers might be able to crack Bitcoin keys in just 9 minutes. 

It’s a huge finding that will have massive repercussions (a quantum leap, if you will) for finance, Web3, NFTs and my bro Darren who put all his life savings into BTC when it hit its ATH.

So, yes, cyptophers (people who use crypto) knew this was on the horizon but they thought they had more time (don’t we all). But Google’s Quantum AI researchers have just published a white paper (what is with you guys and white papers?) that moves the date for the great quantum jailbreak (q-day) up to 2032.

What they found was that the number of quantum bits (qubits) required to break bitcoin, ether and most other cryptocurrencies isn’t in the millions, it’s more like 500,000.

Fuck.

Ok, ok, settle down everyone. Stop screaming. We’re still a long ways off. The most advanced quantum chip out there is Google’s own Willow which has a pathetic 105 qubits. (Wait, what’s stopping anyone from stapling 5000 of those to each other?)

If you’re wondering more about how this actually works, here’s a paragraph from the Forbes article that I’m cribbing, they explain it much better than I could:

“Bitcoin’s security relies on a single mathematical assumption: that deriving a private key from a public key is computationally impossible for any existing machine. The specific math is called the Elliptic Curve Discrete Logarithm Problem. Every time someone sends bitcoin, they reveal their public key. A classical computer would need longer than the age of the universe to reverse-engineer the private key from it.”

But quantum computers aren’t classical computers and they can compute far more complicated computational computations, the kind that could “derive a private key, forge a digital signature and drain a wallet.”

Bitcoin mining though wouldn’t be affected, that uses a different algorithm or something, idk, I’m not smart.

As expected, the markets reacted to this news with supposedly quantum resistant crypto coins surging a massive 50% in value. Guys calm down, nothing’s happened yet.