hype

Yes, “AI” will compromise your information security posture. No, not through some mythical self-aware galaxy-brain entity magically cracking your passwords in seconds or “autonomously” exploiting new vulnerabilities.

It’s way more mundane.

When immensely complex, poorly-understood systems get hurriedly integrated into your toolset and workflow, or deployed in your infrastructure, what inevitably follows is leaks, compromises, downtime, and a whole lot of grief.

Complexity means cost and risk

LLM-based systems are insanely complex, both on the conceptual level, and on the implementation level. Complexity has real cost and introduces very real risk. These costs and these risks are enormous, poorly understood – and usually just hand-waved away. As Suha Hussain puts it in a video I’ll discuss a bit later:

Large publicly traded tech companies seem to no longer consider their customers – that is, people and organizations who actually buy their products or pay for access to their services – their core focus. The focus has instead turned towards the stock price.

Their real clients, the entities they really care about, are the stockholders. Reasons are many, perhaps one of them being that people making decisions tend to own stock options or have bonuses tied to stock performance of the companies they run.

This means that for a large, established tech company the product or service it offers does not matter all that much anymore. It needs to be just barely good enough to keep people using it. The easiest way to do this is some form of a monopoly.

Monopoly is the business model of Silicon Valley, and they are not even shy about that.

Pieces of the web that make differing and complementary sense of the threat and promise of AI.

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