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points by insanitybit 21 hours ago | 0 comments

> something that our systems are meant to prevent

What prevention method did they take? Like, did they run with hyperthreading enabled or something by accident?

Did they discover a new cache timing technique or is this just the standard stuff?

If they just had hyperthreading on maybe they need to hire someone who knows more about this stuff.

Two VMs should never be sharing a physical core. If they don't know this, yikes.

I would assume that a company with the resources of an OpenAI or Anthropic would have already thought about this very thoroughly, based on Spectre/rowhammer/meltdown/etc. If a random HNer (no offense) can have a hardware 101-level thought, someone there would have that thought too.

But that assumption has been wrong before.

[–] insanitybit 20 hours ago

Well I'm not a random HNer lol I work in security.

Are you suggesting that they've come up with a novel technique that doesn't involve sharing a CPU core? I'm open to that.

From what I can tell, this is not the case, but I haven't read a detailed report (I don't know of one, would be cool if it's out there though).

[–] fwip 20 hours ago

They have thought about it, and the goal is for the agent to succeed at doing the scary things. So the knobs that they don't talk about, assume they are tuned to make the scary thing possible.