AI broke the cybersecurity world. Now what?

00:54:18 · S3Play from here

[00:54:18] S3: I am not as up on the literature here. I think up to this point, there has been a pretty decent arms race. By definition, AI will continue to get better because the way... Especially for visual models, for diffusion models, the way they work is that you have detection oracles that they test against. Certainly, you can never have something open source because it will immediately end up in the diffusion model. Right? But for closed source Oracles, where then you do not make it easy for them to test the Oracle, one of the key things you do in trust and safety is then you have delayed enforcement mechanisms, so they can't brute force and and test. I think it is quite possible. Let's say I was still at Meta. My advice to them would be to then also explore a variety of of different detection mechanisms outside of the content itself. Right? And so I would do the best I can on the content, but I would also be doing low level access as possible to the camera. I would only let content to come from the camera. And what I would say is, Nilay's completely correct, there's a massive hunger for, especially among young people, stuff that is authentic. I have three teenagers, and they hate AI. They hate AI slop. They have a massive negative reaction. My wife and I created just, a cute little family AI thing, and they, I mean, they yell at us about a bunch of stuff, but they lost their minds about this, like, cute little family AI thing. Right? Be... They just hate it. And so I think there's... Somebody is gonna come and disrupt Instagram, and it's gonna be because... There's already... I've seen these little things where it's like you take the photo during the day, like, real and stuff. There's like these little things, but somebody's gonna massively disrupt Instagram because they're taking the images of the photos straight off the camera, and then all the editing is going to be only within the app, and they are going to do things to make sure that nothing is ever... Nothing can make it into the pipeline from AI, and that you're going to allow some kind of cap cut like functionality that never has an AI component. And I think that is going to be a killer app.

00:56:29 · Nilay Patel, S3Play from here

[00:56:29] S2: Man, I could do another whole hour with you on this because the the the system you're describing there is not detecting AI content. It is verifying real content. [00:56:38] S3: It's much easier. Verifying real content is much easier. Right? And and there's been a big focus on this on the professional side. Right? Like, Adobe has a whole thing of, like, if you're a New York Times photographer, you have a $5,000 Nikon or Canon. You take the photo, [00:56:51] S2: and it's here has that in it now. [00:56:54] S3: Right? Like, there's a lot of this now. Yeah. [00:56:56] S2: There's a there's a lot of this out there. It's... But it's the other side that I'm I'm thinking about. Right? Where it's... We are going to detect AI text. Right? The the the leading model companies, because of European regulations, are now, like, futzing with the text they generate so they [00:57:10] S3: Text is much text is much harder because you just have so much less data. Right? Like, especially if a 140 characters, like, what do you have in there to detect? You know, the more you've got, the more you can do. [00:57:19] S2: It is amazing because I can detect Claude a mile away. So may... Maybe maybe I'll just rely on my own [00:57:24] S3: human judgment. Not in a... Not in tweet length. [00:57:26] S2: That's true. The the cheap ones, can. But I'm just saying, like, the notion that we're gonna verify what's real instead of detecting what's fake feels very important in the context of the media we consume.

00:57:26 · Nilay Patel, S3Play from here

[00:57:26] S2: That's true. The the cheap ones, can. But I'm just saying, like, the notion that we're gonna verify what's real instead of detecting what's fake feels very important in the context of the media we consume. [00:57:40] S3: I think detecting what's fake is always gonna be probabilistic, and we're gonna asymptotically approach impossibility, whereas detecting what's real can be cryptographically perfect. So I I would not pick the battle that we will eventually lose. I would pick the battle that we can cryptographically win. That would be my suggestion. [00:57:58] S2: And there's somewhere in there where you have to build an entire chain of custody. Right? We're gonna take the sensor data off the camera. We're gonna put it in a cloud server. We're only gonna allow edits on this server. That file will never get monkeyed with. [00:58:10] S3: Sure. That's true for the New York Times. [00:58:13] S2: Yeah. [00:58:13] S3: And you know, Adobe Photoshop and stuff, but not for Instagram. For Instagram, you can do it all because it's it's only the iPhone, and it's only Instagram. So, like, you... The entire chain of custody is within your app. It is within the iPhone sensor. It's in Instagram. So, like, it's actually easy for them. [00:58:29] S2: Look. Like I said, we could do another whole hour on that because it feels like right next to the cybersecurity problem is the social engineering problem, and right next to the social engineering problem is the fake media problem. Right? Like, how many phishing attacks are just this website looked pretty real? And

00:58:29 · Nilay Patel, S3Play from here

[00:58:29] S2: Look. Like I said, we could do another whole hour on that because it feels like right next to the cybersecurity problem is the social engineering problem, and right next to the social engineering problem is the fake media problem. Right? Like, how many phishing attacks are just this website looked pretty real? And [00:58:46] S3: Oh, yeah. [00:58:46] S2: Or this person is talking to you, or there's an AI voice on the other side of the phone. And all of that comes down to, can you detect what's fake instead of verifying what's real? And I Oh, no. [00:58:55] S3: I I've had to train my... Yeah. I've had to train my parents that if you get a video from your grandchildren saying they've been kidnapped, you have to call me because the odds that it's real is is not very high. [00:59:07] S2: Yeah. [00:59:07] S3: Right? Like, that's where we're at as a as a society. [00:59:10] S2: I feel like I wanna end on a hopeful note, and I don't know how to do it from there. [00:59:14] S3: Wrong guess for that, buddy. Yeah. [00:59:17] S2: This is why you only come out every few years. But now after this, we're gonna we're gonna do the series of, like, birthday party guests. So you... You've been talking about the dark ages. You you... We're in it, right, where it's starting to accelerate. What are the markers people should look for in terms of progress? Right? To say, okay, we're climbing our way back up.

00:59:36 · S3Play from here

[00:59:36] S3: AI is great for lots of things. I think AI is going to enable individuals. Right? Like, we're gonna see a huge explosion of new companies. Like, you could start... I mean, Stanford students have always been entrepreneurial, but the number of my students who are now starting two, three, four person companies who are doing incredible things, who used to need to hire 50 or a 100 people and take a ton of venture capital is incredible. Right? So I think we're gonna continue to see that. One of the things we hopefully see is we start to see a a... We'll see a downtick in the number of major breaches at some point. We should hopefully see a downtick in the major CVEs that are wormable and that are in kind of the fundamental infrastructure pieces kernel. You know? Like I said, I want Linux to be rewritten, but hopefully, we see a downtick in, like, the Linux kernel and those other kinds of libraries, you know, OpenSSL, glibc, things like that. I haven't seen... Maybe I should vibe code this up, but I think it would be cool to have, like, an index of, like, where are we in this cycle Mhmm. Of of, like, an artificial index of all of these... You know, the DAO for all of the libraries of of of where we're going. Plus, you know, right now, patch Tuesday used to be, like, a 150, 200, got to 300, 600. I think the last one was 900 something, so we're geometrically growing. So it'd be nice to see Patch Tuesday start to go back down. Yeah. Apple patches are the same thing. Yep. You you inspired me. So I'm gonna I'm gonna create a Dow index for this of of the the the dark age index. Right? And then maybe we can publish it on The Verge.

01:01:13 · Nilay Patel, S3Play from here

[01:01:13] S2: Yeah. [01:01:13] S3: But I think these are the kinds of things that it would be nice to see a reversal, and what it would be especially nice to see is that the day... Or actually, like, thirty days before you get, like, the next version of OpenAI and Anthropic cyber models that you don't have this huge round of patches. Because what's happening is those guys are running their models against Microsoft's code, against a bunch of open source, and they're giving all the the bugs away, and you don't know where the bugs are coming from. Right? It's just like anonymous reports for a thousand bugs in the Linux kernel. And and then a month later, here's the new AsterCyber. And so if those get smaller and smaller every time, then it means that we're starting to reach some kind of steady state. [01:01:53] S2: You should definitely do that tracker. We will definitely publish it. Alex, it has been incredible to have you on the show. We'll have to talk again soon. [01:01:58] S3: Yeah. Thank you so much for... I think you do some of the best journalism on this stuff, and I really appreciate it.