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I wonder if there are fake AI researchers in china with Intelligence Community links who specialise in laundering trade secrets from hacked western slack channels. Modifying it, decomposing it and spreading it over multiple launderers with conceivably relevant background, rephrasing it (perhaps sometimes improving upon the original phrasing) passing it off as original and broadly disseminating it in chinese research communities.
I want to see them. I want to turn over the stone and look at the amazing bugs. But would it really help anything to legibilize this? I'd kind of assume everyone assumes this is happening already and I expect biglabs to buy formally verified secure groupware as soon as that exists, and then insider risk still remains.
But also I'm not totally sure it can be legibilized. It didn't occur to me how many obfuscation techniques they could be using until I articulated them just then.
There have been Chinese (and North Korean) spies in US tech companies before.
I would expect that such a spy would be more effective as a spy if they were also a real AI researcher, though; in the same way that a spy inside a non-AI software-engineering organization would be more effective if they also had software engineering skills.
So yeah, there are probably people around reading things that were not intended for them, and maybe misrepresenting who they work for or what their name is. But they're probably not "fake" AI researchers, they're real AI researchers who are also sneaky.
No, the spies and the disseminators are usually not going to be the same people. If someone who works for OpenAI is also going to china and doing talks at chinese machine learning conferences where they're leaking trade secrets, that would get noticed. If instead they're having private conversations with a limited set of chinese machine learning researchers who are trusted by the government obfuscate the source of "their ideas", that can work.
And I think the disseminators will end up being fake researchers because their number needs to be kept small and ob... (read more)