AI

The last two weeks online have been like a flood, I’m not even sure what words to use to describe them accurately, but I’ll give this a go:

  • Disinformation
  • Misinformation
  • Hype

I have been shocked really at what has occurred, in front of me:

  • Mass hysteria
  • Media hosting people constantly who are making unprovable claims with seemingly no real challenge

It’s been frankly exhausting to watch, let alone being involved in a range of discussions online:

  • I’ve seen people actually say things like: we have created a new lifeform, AI is alive etc. (paraphrasing)
  • I’ve had people tell me that these computing systems are not computers (WTF)
  • I’ve seen journalists essentially platform and parroting people with what appears to be significant loss of grasp of science and reality.

So I’ve been quite active online (whilst trying to field off questions from friends, family and colleagues about: is AI going to kill us? (good god how much time has been wasted!) but also I’ve been trying to give people a view of reality TODAY! So that’s partly what this blog is about!

But they are SCIENTISTS!

Hold up a minute, what the hell do you think computer science is? what do you think ‘IT’ is? Let alone the cyber security part?!

Computer Science (I even studied this (badly) at School)

Computing Technology management (Digital, Cyber whatever phrases you want to use) is not Magic, it’s science!

  • We build labs/experiments (yay science)
  • We develop solutions (yay science)
  • We create/develop/maintain standards (yay science)
  • We do testing (yay science)
  • We use data (yay science)
  • We monitor (yay science)

Scientist isn’t a protected title in the UK, literally anyone can call themselves a scientist! (and that’s been part of the marketing!)

So, to disregard people with 20+ years computer science experience because someone said the world is going to end and they have scientist in their job title is absolutely insane! (IMHO)

The End of the World is coming? WTF

I struggle to write this without my Sennybridge trained language coming into play…. (a joke about my experience as a CCF cadet, mother said they taught me to; smoke, swear and fight…) (I don’t smoke, I do swear and I try and avoid being in fights!)

  • what the hell are these people on about?
  • are they insane?
  • how are these people being put on the news?
  • why are they trying to scare the world?
  • what aren’t the media talking to cyber security experts?

The claims include: ‘There is a 10% likelihood that AI will end the human race in the next 10 years’

Honestly, I can’t begin to tell you had insane that is, to go on TV and say that, with no model, no working out, not science!

My response – Build (another) LAB

After being shocked at what I was seeing, I decided the best way to combat disinformation is with the light of the truth! To fall back to what I am fairly ok at, building LABS!

Build a multi-environment set of infrastructure and services:

  • AI Enabled Attacker (local LLM with EGPU + Cloud Based LLM access to ‘newish’ tech (MODELS)) (Claude, GROK, Co-Pilot, ChatGPT/Codex)
    • Monitored with an EDR
    • Network based IPS
    • Host based IPS
  • Low Side Network (this is equivalent to a network assured for UK OFFICIAL or COMMERCIAL Networks) with internet access
    • EDR
    • IPS
    • Compute/Hypervisors
  • High SIde Network
    • This has physical isolation (an air gap)
    • a LAN only network
    • physical security
      • CCTV
      • Light, Temperature, Motion, Humidity sensor

But it’s AI!

Oh god ok here we go, someone has written some software (code, logic, data) that runs on a computer but they have called it a generic terms for a collection of technology and now the world has lost it’s mind because everyone thinks this is from Hollywood!

Right, there’s nothing for it, I will BUILD my own ‘AI’ computer system! (there’s an SDLC, we have as humanity been doing this stuff for a long long time!)

so I well, I did! I even used an LLM to help me (because time pressures etc.)

So I built a small language model (which is at a high level the same as building a large language model, just it’s smaller!). Because in nerd land, if you talk about something you haven’t done, it gets messy really fast! So, I built my own AI! (all be it a bit of a crappy one!). I’ve published this at a medium level of detail in this GitHub repo (I will likely publish everything I built) (we build software we do not GROW IT! God dammit Jim I’m engineering not a science fiction writer!!!)

https://mr-r3b00t.github.io/learning_ai

This was all generated with an LLM, run in my lab, computed on my local GPU (using Claude with OPUS 5)

The AI Brain Worm

There have been claims that AI will destroy humanity. (This is well documented, it’s been on TV, and just about every mainstream news org)

It’s been absolutely crazy to watch from my point of view, but it’s also relentless, from the media through to social media:

every day it seems we have a new unproven claim, a new fantasy, a new real story but one that often seems to be laced with holywood!

The AI Cyber Worm

On top of the major brain worms about LLMs being:

  • A silicon based lifeform
  • Alive
  • Grown
  • etc.

and then we have the: WHAT IF?

It’s like watching an episode of Ancient Aliens but it’s on 247!

Now some people are saying things which are worth considering by a few people, for some time. But some of these theories are (as far as today’s experience, knowledge and understanding go) complete fiction. (I’m not oblivious to the notion that the future changes our capabilities etc.).

I will try and find time to go into deep detail on some of these, but I think each one would need their own blog post, and I think if I did everyone I’d end up homeless from never having any time to do any work!

The reality – will an ‘AI tech’ worm kill us all (today)?

Creating an LLMs (or SLMs) using CPUs…. I hadn’t even bothered to test this because it was so far in my brain obviously not feasabile:

but a tweep did (how cool):

When we look at things that are possible today:

We can and have been able to write polymorphic code since the 80s (

Bounded by a Computer (or computers)

What we are calling ‘AI’ is artificial. There has been so much focus on Intelligence, I think some people have forgotten this is running on a computer.

  • The processes are bounded by the computer system/s that are computing/processing the activity.
  • The technology is more like a MIMIC than a person/intelligence

No explanation in short common usage language will work here, the reality is what we are calling AI is a collection of computing technologies that can and are being chained together:

  • Machine Vision
  • Machine Learning
  • Natural Language Computing

A really short way of saying this is: ‘smart automations’ (and even that doesn’t really give the right view IHMO).

The good, the bad and the ugly

I started this post with the idea I was going to delve into everything that has gone on, but even that now feels like a moving goalpost and a monumental task. I’ve had to build labs, do research, speak to a lot of people, check facts, read long reports and remember to eat, live, etc. (that part is easy, this is important but not as important as well, most things in life!)

  • These technologies can bring opportunity
  • They have pros and cons
  • Learning them is important
  • applying this technology in a reasonably safe and secure manner in the context of the application is very important
  • there are risks, not just with the ‘computer systems’ but also with the wider integration to society
  • there are risks around the development of these models and technologies

One thing we can say, this tech has already been crowbarred into a lot of places, was that the right thing to do? Should people focus on adopting AI without really thinking about why? Should we not try and learn some lessons from the past? This is a fast paced dynamic landscape, what I say today may be wrong tomorrow (as it were). I do know that sometimes history is a good teacher, and knowing how things work is fairly important when it comes to trying to do things in a safe and secure way.

I feel the last month is showing that as a whole we are doing this well, from so many perspectives.

The future is always uncertain!

We can’t predict the weather accurately for the following day/week, so the idea that there’s a lot of people posting online that can see into the future is quite funny in some ways. A lot of cyber tea leaf reading appears to be the way we roll now, I for one, will just drink the tea and carry on computering,trying to ground my views from data, testing and experience!

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