It’s Labor Day, so I think a local ride, get some groceries, and clean up a few outstanding tasks.

Also, I need to pick out some stuff for the basement and finish laundry

And, it’s a good day to get stuff done for Wolfram

Sleeper Social Bots: a new generation of AI disinformation bots are already a political threat

• This paper presents a study on the growing threat of “sleeper social bots,” AI-driven social bots in the political landscape, created to spread disinformation and manipulate public opinion. We based the name sleeper social bots on their ability to pass as humans on social platforms, where they’re embedded like political “sleeper” agents, making them harder to detect and more disruptive. To illustrate the threat these bots pose, our research team at the University of Southern California constructed a demonstration using a private Mastodon server, where ChatGPT-driven bots, programmed with distinct personalities and political viewpoints, engaged in discussions with human participants about a fictional electoral proposition. Our preliminary findings suggest these bots can convincingly pass as human users, actively participate in conversations, and effectively disseminate disinformation. Moreover, they can adapt their arguments based on the responses of human interlocutors, showcasing their dynamic and persuasive capabilities. College students participating in initial experiments failed to identify our bots, underscoring the urgent need for increased awareness and education about the dangers of AI-driven disinformation, and in particular, disinformation spread by bots. The implications of our research point to the significant challenges posed by social bots in the upcoming 2024 U.S. presidential election and beyond.

Chores! Rain! The radar says that everything is moving out to the East, but still misting here

Everything, everywhere, is all the same: Cognitive Domain Operations: The PLA’s New Holistic Concept for Influence Operations

Need to work on the critique section a bit.

Need to read Diffusion Models Are Real-Time Game Engines

Got the recumbent over to Aaron, made it to the point that he could ride around the parking lot. Let me tell you, recumbents are not easy bikes to ride!

Flu and Covid shots!

Bunch of interesting papers came across my feeds today:

RAG Foundry: A Framework for Enhancing LLMs for Retrieval Augmented Generation

• Implementing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems is inherently complex, requiring deep understanding of data, use cases, and intricate design decisions. Additionally, evaluating these systems presents significant challenges, necessitating assessment of both retrieval accuracy and generative quality through a multi-faceted approach. We introduce RAG Foundry, an open-source framework for augmenting large language models for RAG use cases. RAG Foundry integrates data creation, training, inference and evaluation into a single workflow, facilitating the creation of data-augmented datasets for training and evaluating large language models in RAG settings. This integration enables rapid prototyping and experimentation with various RAG techniques, allowing users to easily generate datasets and train RAG models using internal or specialized knowledge sources. We demonstrate the framework effectiveness by augmenting and fine-tuning Llama-3 and Phi-3 models with diverse RAG configurations, showcasing consistent improvements across three knowledge-intensive datasets. Code is released as open-source in this https URL.

MiniCPM-V: A GPT-4V Level MLLM on Your Phone (Important for black hat / white hat AI)

• The recent surge of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has fundamentally reshaped the landscape of AI research and industry, shedding light on a promising path toward the next AI milestone. However, significant challenges remain preventing MLLMs from being practical in real-world applications. The most notable challenge comes from the huge cost of running an MLLM with a massive number of parameters and extensive computation. As a result, most MLLMs need to be deployed on high-performing cloud servers, which greatly limits their application scopes such as mobile, offline, energy-sensitive, and privacy-protective scenarios. In this work, we present MiniCPM-V, a series of efficient MLLMs deployable on end-side devices. By integrating the latest MLLM techniques in architecture, pretraining and alignment, the latest MiniCPM-Llama3-V 2.5 has several notable features: (1) Strong performance, outperforming GPT-4V-1106, Gemini Pro and Claude 3 on OpenCompass, a comprehensive evaluation over 11 popular benchmarks, (2) strong OCR capability and 1.8M pixel high-resolution image perception at any aspect ratio, (3) trustworthy behavior with low hallucination rates, (4) multilingual support for 30+ languages, and (5) efficient deployment on mobile phones. More importantly, MiniCPM-V can be viewed as a representative example of a promising trend: The model sizes for achieving usable (e.g., GPT-4V) level performance are rapidly decreasing, along with the fast growth of end-side computation capacity. This jointly shows that GPT-4V level MLLMs deployed on end devices are becoming increasingly possible, unlocking a wider spectrum of real-world AI applications in the near future.

Does Reasoning Emerge? Examining the Probabilities of Causation in Large Language Models

• Recent advances in AI have been significantly driven by the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to solve complex problems in ways that resemble human thinking. However, there is an ongoing debate about the extent to which LLMs are capable of actual reasoning. Central to this debate are two key probabilistic concepts that are essential for connecting causes to their effects: the probability of necessity (PN) and the probability of sufficiency (PS). This paper introduces a framework that is both theoretical and practical, aimed at assessing how effectively LLMs are able to replicate real-world reasoning mechanisms using these probabilistic measures. By viewing LLMs as abstract machines that process information through a natural language interface, we examine the conditions under which it is possible to compute suitable approximations of PN and PS. Our research marks an important step towards gaining a deeper understanding of when LLMs are capable of reasoning, as illustrated by a series of math examples.

The ATLAS Matrix shows the progression of tactics used in attacks as columns from left to right, with ML techniques belonging to each tactic. Click on the blue links to learn more about each item, or search and view ATLAS tactics and techniques using the links at the top navigation bar. View the ATLAS matrix highlighted alongside ATT&CK Enterprise techniques on the ATLAS Navigator.

SBIRs

• Add headers and footers to the white paper, go over once more with Aaron, and send to Orest. Done. Sent to ARL!
• 1:00 Tbolt meeting. Look over new documentation. Looks like we’re going to do something. Communication on ActiveMQ
• 4:30: Book club

GPT Agents

• 3:00 Meeting. Need to finish refactoring paper before then

It is going to be hot today. Ride early!

SBIRs

• Looks like a light day. I’m going to work on the NNM white paper and try to get it to the point to submit. Done! Two pages!
• Ping MARCOM about interview request
• 3:00 WHAIM – changed to work on the NNM white paper
• 1:00 – 4:00 PWND2 industry day. Interesting, but not our thing

SBIRs

• Good lord, I got a (positive!) response from the ARL! In less that 12 hours! Looks like nothing too formal for the white paper: “It’s to help me understand where a new project might fit, with relatively little effort on the part of a PI compared with writing a full (NSF-style/scope) proposal.”
• 9:00 standup
• 1:00 Thunderbolt
• 5:00 S3i meeting

GPT Agents. Need to do more refactoring of the paper

Longest ride of the season this past Saturday. Beautiful, but I was barely in good enough shape.

SBIRs

• Ethics training if I can log in. Nope – still locked out. Ok, now I can get in, but there is nothing there? Even weirder, the course I should take is marked as complete. Not sure what to do at this point since I can’t take a completed course, but I did download the cert if someone changes things again.
• S3i meeting
• Other training? Sent email to T. Looks like the system says I’m done
• Need to figure out a WHAI or NNM demo that can be done by the end of the year. So about 16 weeks, when you pull out TDay and Xmas

SBIRs

• 9:00 Standup
• 11:00 HSI discussion
• 1:00 Tbolt
• 4:00 Book club
• Ethics training if I can log in
• Write email to Iain, get that approved, and send off today

GPT Agents

• Weekly meeting. Still need to read Jimmy’s and Shimei’s section. I did find the link to Wikipedia’s funding, which is pretty impressive

Still can’t find a place to fix the door. I may take the panel off and see if I can just replace/fix the cable

Looks like deepfakes are about to get a whole lot better:

SBIRs

• 10:30 BD discussion on what to do next with WHAI and NNM – done. Need to send some emails. Iain first
• 1:30 CwoC meeting
• 4:30 S3I prep call. Done in 30 minutes!
• Training – finished cyber

GPT Agents

• Got to a good point of the article. Will wait until after Thursday’s meeting before doing anything else. Need to read Jimmy’s and Shimei’s part first, though

Still trying to get the door serviced. Other Ram dealers in the area:

SBIRs

• Finished most BD things that I can do before I get some decision on what to do next. Schedule a meeting? Sent out the contents as an email attachment. Scheduled meeting for 10:30 Wednesday.
• 9:00 Data Science standup
• 2:30 AI Ethics
• 3:45 L3Harris Prep – done
• 4:00 L3Harris meeting

GPT Agents

• Work on the Soft Totalitarianism section and add cites – good progress!

Trying to get the door repair scheduled. The dealer is only accepting drop offs with a multi-week wait. Much harder than it should be. Jim Donnie’s suggested K&L

SBIRs

• Working on getting all the BD pieces together for the NNM/WH-AI. Added the main documents to the appendix, and am working on an inquiry email. Really gotta wonder why we employ all these capture managers.
• Wrote two preliminary inquiry emails
• Had some fun thinking about a better trade show booth.

GPT Agents

• Edit and add the Soft Totalitarianism section. Then get back to adding citations

Tasks

• Schedule to get the door fixed

GPT Agents

• Write up some thoughts on “Soft Totalitarianism” of intelligent technology – done

Tasks

• 9:40 Dentist
• Bank
• Schedule to get the door fixed

SBIRs

• Trawled the swamp and found some good NSF and Army possibilities from grants.gov. You can export the results as a csv file and search through those, either by link (which can be wrong) or by googling project name, which works. Found some very good opportunities for NNMs, and some others for White Hat AI. The earliest opportunity closes Sept 30, which is enough time to write a reasonable proposal. Nothing specifically about spearphishing, which is kind of interesting. That seems to be acceptable in some way.
• 9:00 Standup. Will have to leave early
• 2:00 Thunderbolt meeting
• 4:30 Book club

GPT Agents

• No meeting today, Jimmy’s at a wedding. Add more content?

More justification for WH-AI: Hackers may have stolen the Social Security numbers of every American. How to protect yourself

• “These bad guys, this is what they do for a living,” Murray said. They might send out tens of thousands of queries and get only one response, but that response could net them $10,000 from an unwitting victim. “Ten thousand dollars in one day for having one hit with one victim, that’s a pretty good return on investment,” she said. “That’s what motivates them.”

More stuff for consumer-first AI: Cosmos Magazine publishes AI-generated articles, drawing criticism from journalists, co-founders

Schedule to get the door fixed

SBIRs

• Ping John to see if we can schedule WH-AI architecture planning
• Draw up some diagrams for the architecture that we can go over
  • Information flows
  • Main browser extension – just Chrome for now
  • Maybe three buttons for the popup?- Avoid, disregard, this is an error?
  • Adjustment knobs for target user – also notification settings for guardians (parents, adult children, etc.)
  • Private User database of issued warnings, so that users don’t see the same “introductory” warning. This DB could also have sender information
  • Some other kind of warning if the user is repeatedly interacting with the sender of manipulative email, particularly if it matches one of the scam patterns.
  • Spaced repetition of older warnings
  • Public database of manipulative posts, if warnings were disregarded or heeded. This can feed back to the the Chrome extension as well in case there are multiple adjacent embeddings that are, for example, increasing in a viral way.
  • A UMAP display of the embedding space that lets users navigate and understand what’s going on. Areas of high activity should be indicated. Clicking on a point or dragging across an area should provides specific and/or summary information
  • Reactive design for Chrome on mobile?
• UMAP-JS
  • This is a JavaScript reimplementation of UMAP from the python implementation found at https://github.com/lmcinnes/umap.
• Nope, strike that. Everything has to have a potential target before it gets worked on. So I’ve gone from belief space maps to white hat AI PoC to looking through SBIRs and BAAs. Ah, well, only 132 working days until 15 February 2025.
• Put together a good size list of people to reach out to. Still need to trawl the BAA/SBIR swamp

GPT Agents

• Read what I wrote yesterday. Look for sources. I’m particularly interested if there is anything on the creation of guardrails. There might be a perspective here that comes from labor relations, like having to buy GMO seeds rather than being able to re-plant based on the harvest? Extracting maximum value while providing minimum utility. Also worth re-reading the Stochastic Parrots paper and look for interesting papers that cite it. It strikes me that the whole idea of “public” GenAI may also reference the “right to repair” movement, and Robin Berjon’s The Public Interest Internet.

Tasks

• Schedule to get the truck door fixed
• BoA closes at 4:00. Go over at 3:00?

SBIRs

• Need to talk to Aaron about switching from NNM to WH-AI and see if I can get some Fabric time
• Getting started on Chrome Extensions
• Good chat with Zach. He agrees that starting with a chrome extension makes sense.

GPT Agents

• Need to get started on the “A Consumer-First Approach to GenAI?” paper, now that the reviews are none. Good start