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Security Research

Are large language models worth it?

Are the harms that LLMs have caused, and will soon cause, worth the benefits they may bring? This article (a written version of a keynote talk I gave...

1 month, 3 weeks ago Nicholas Ca…
156 words 1 min
Security Research

Gate-level emulation of an Intel 4004 in 4004 bytes of C

A feature-complete gate-level microcoded Intel 4004 in 4004 bytes of C, capable of emulating the original Busicom calculator ROM for which the chip wa...

5 months, 1 week ago Nicholas Ca…
147 words 1 min
Security Research

miniHDL: A Python Hardware Description Language DSL

A small hardware description language implemented as a DSL on Python, with a small 170 LoC 32-bit RISC CPU....

5 months, 1 week ago Nicholas Ca…
89 words 1 min
Security Research

Machines of Ruthless Efficiency

Future LLMs have the potential to cause significant harm due to their ruthless effiency. I'm worried this will happen, and discuss the ways in which i...

9 months, 3 weeks ago Nicholas Ca…
132 words 1 min
Security Research

My Thoughts on the Future of "AI"

I have very wide error bars on the potential future of large language models, and I think you should too. It's possible LLMs basically lead to AGI, an...

9 months, 4 weeks ago Nicholas Ca…
153 words 1 min
Security Research

What my privacy papers (don't) have to say about copyright …

My work on privacy-preserving machine learning is often cited by lawyers arguing for or against how generative AI models violate copyright. This maybe...

10 months ago Nicholas Ca…
156 words 1 min
Security Research

Career Update: Google DeepMind -> Anthropic

I have decided to leave Google, and will be joining Anthropic to continue my work on machine learning security...

10 months ago Nicholas Ca…
92 words 1 min
Security Research

AI forecasting retrospective: you're (probably) over-confid…

A one-year review of people's predictions on an AI-forecasting survey I made last year. Most people were over-confident in their predictions....

11 months ago Nicholas Ca…
121 words 1 min
Security Research

A 2-ply minimax chess engine in 84,688 regular expressions

I wrote a (list of) regular expressions that will play a (not very good) chess game by running a 2-ply minimax search....

1 year ago Nicholas Ca…
97 words 1 min
Security Research

Letting Language Models Write my Website

I let a language model write my bio. It went about as well as you might expect....

1 year ago Nicholas Ca…
63 words 1 min
Security Research

You should forecast the future of AI

You should forecast the future of AI in this quiz, so that you can see just how right or wrong you are....

1 year, 1 month ago Nicholas Ca…
82 words 1 min
Security Research

How I Use "AI"

I don't think that AI models (by which I mean: large language models) are over-hyped. In this post I will list 50 ways I've used them....

1 year, 5 months ago Nicholas Ca…
109 words 1 min
Security Research

Why I attack

Yesterday I was forwarded a bunch of messages that Prof. Ben Zhao (a computer science professor [a] A full professor with tenure, so I feel entirely w...

1 year, 6 months ago Nicholas Ca…
248 words 1 min
Security Research

(yet another) Broken Adversarial Example Defense at IEEE S&…

IEEE SP 2024 (one of the top computer security conferences) has, again, accepted an adversarial example defense paper that is broken with simple attac...

1 year, 8 months ago Nicholas Ca…
331 words 1 min
Security Research

My benchmark for large language models

A benchmark of ~100 tests for language models, collected from actual questions I've asked of language models in the last year....

1 year, 10 months ago Nicholas Ca…
106 words 1 min
Security Research

My research idea logfile, 2016-2019

How do I pick what research problems I want to solve? I get asked this question often, most recently in December at NeurIPS, and so on my flight back...

1 year, 11 months ago Nicholas Ca…
531 words 1 min
Security Research

Reading Data off an Apple ProFile Hard Drive with an Arduino

So let's suppose you had a 1980s Apple ProFile Hard Drive, and you wanted to recover the data....

2 years, 1 month ago Nicholas Ca…
77 words 1 min
Security Research

Playing chess with large language models

Building a chess bot that queries GPT-3.5-turbo-instruct to play chess at the level of a skilled human player....

2 years, 3 months ago Nicholas Ca…
93 words 1 min
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