00:31:40 · Irene Solaiman, Rebecca Balan
[00:31:40] S2: I mean, there there's going to be just an advantage in the level of product support that you get from a closed weight lab. Most of these outside of the the really well resourced, like the Alibaba's, you know, we're still 200 people while we're undergoing this acquisition. So we're not gonna be able to provide that level of handholding. But for what folks need for for cyber defense at a time where there's a lot of... I'm I'm quite nervous about the state of the Internet. We we need to have some level of... This is a trade off. We need to have access to the folks who know what they're doing, who are getting refusals from the most frontier models. There's a dichotomy, unfortunately, between cybersecurity and AI safety folks, and both have well and good intentions. But a lot of security folks love open source because of the privacy, because of those on prem considerations, because of what they can do with it, and really have this ideological preference for open weeks in a way that is creating a new kind of open versus closed conversation. But the urgency from our perspective and from where I'm sitting at Hugging Face is that we just need to quit Defenders yesterday. And if that means giving folks a more permissive model, it seems that's the balance that we'll have to make. [00:33:05] S1: Is there anything that could convince you otherwise? Like, is there any type of attack that might happen that would make you think, actually, like, I don't want peep... Like, attackers to have access to, you know, powerful obliterated open models.
00:33:05 · Rebecca Balan, Irene Solaiman
[00:33:05] S1: Is there anything that could convince you otherwise? Like, is there any type of attack that might happen that would make you think, actually, like, I don't want peep... Like, attackers to have access to, you know, powerful obliterated open models. [00:33:20] S2: I mean, this is the visibility of who's doing the attacks and who's doing the defense. I wish that we had better ways. This is what we've asked for policy wise is better incident reporting and standards. We're so glad that we were able to be as explicit as possible, but it was quite difficult to figure out how to report it and to whom. So as folks both on the the frontier side but also who are doing defense, who are victims of attacks, are undergoing this, I would ask that they be explicit as possible in sharing openly what they're undergoing, if they have an understanding of what model was being used. To your explicit question of what would change my mind, I think it is a clear clear data that the risks of open weights being leveraged in attacks outweighs the possibility for defense. And a lot of this is compute constrained. I don't think there is enough compute available actor to do the level of large scale at this point, which could change in the near future. But in our level of urgency, the need for defense, for even if you've seen these European grocery stores, it might not be the highest priority for critical infrastructure, but for businesses to defend hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in damages seems important.
00:33:20 · Irene Solaiman, Rebecca Balan
[00:33:20] S2: I mean, this is the visibility of who's doing the attacks and who's doing the defense. I wish that we had better ways. This is what we've asked for policy wise is better incident reporting and standards. We're so glad that we were able to be as explicit as possible, but it was quite difficult to figure out how to report it and to whom. So as folks both on the the frontier side but also who are doing defense, who are victims of attacks, are undergoing this, I would ask that they be explicit as possible in sharing openly what they're undergoing, if they have an understanding of what model was being used. To your explicit question of what would change my mind, I think it is a clear clear data that the risks of open weights being leveraged in attacks outweighs the possibility for defense. And a lot of this is compute constrained. I don't think there is enough compute available actor to do the level of large scale at this point, which could change in the near future. But in our level of urgency, the need for defense, for even if you've seen these European grocery stores, it might not be the highest priority for critical infrastructure, but for businesses to defend hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in damages seems important. [00:34:39] S1: Would you support some kind of a a policy that restricted... I mean, if not restricting access to models, restricting access to compute? Compute?
00:34:39 · Rebecca Balan, Irene Solaiman
[00:34:39] S1: Would you support some kind of a a policy that restricted... I mean, if not restricting access to models, restricting access to compute? Compute? [00:34:45] S2: I mean, I think this is a... The kind of... We're playing catch up here. Token efficiency and compute efficiency have made leaps and bounds in the last few years, particularly since DeepSeek R1. I don't think that's the right metric. The general guidance that we need is around what is the appropriate level of access control, because I fear that we're gonna start putting some level of access control on open weight models, and then nobody has access to anything. [00:35:12] S1: Yeah. Okay. You know, a lot of startups are building on open models, open source infra. We touched on this a bit last week when we had Wiz on. A decent amount of them don't have dedicated security teams. I just wanna get your quick take on this before we close out. How can small startups protect themselves now? Like, what are they underestimating perhaps about the current threat landscape?
00:35:12 · Rebecca Balan, Irene Solaiman
[00:35:12] S1: Yeah. Okay. You know, a lot of startups are building on open models, open source infra. We touched on this a bit last week when we had Wiz on. A decent amount of them don't have dedicated security teams. I just wanna get your quick take on this before we close out. How can small startups protect themselves now? Like, what are they underestimating perhaps about the current threat landscape? [00:35:29] S2: It's understandable to to not already be prepared with security teams, even having some level of, familiarity with open resources. My team's working on putting together a plan in the next few weeks. I wish we had it out sooner, but in the meantime, there are really great cybersecurity startups like Semgrep that have open... Openly available documentation. So scale up on the resources available to you. This is the beauty of of an open Internet. And it's okay. It's okay to lean on what's easy for you, but it's on us and the open community to lower the barrier for folks to use cyber defense tools that they can rely on. [00:36:10] S1: Okay. Great. Well, hey. I think with that, we are out of time. Where can our listeners find you, connect with your work online if they wanna, you know, drop in, say hi, slide in your DMs? [00:36:19] S2: I'm not I'm not as good with my DMs as I maybe was pre chat GPT. Yeah. You can you can find us on... Make a Hugging Face account. We're we're all over Hugging Face. I'm most probably available by email, Irene@hf.co, and keep following us on all your favorite social media platforms at Hugging Face.
00:36:19 · Irene Solaiman, Rebecca Balan
[00:36:19] S2: I'm not I'm not as good with my DMs as I maybe was pre chat GPT. Yeah. You can you can find us on... Make a Hugging Face account. We're we're all over Hugging Face. I'm most probably available by email, Irene@hf.co, and keep following us on all your favorite social media platforms at Hugging Face. [00:36:42] S1: Okay. Thank you again, Irene, for joining us on the show. Was great to have you, to our listeners. You can find me on, Twitter and LinkedIn, and you can find Equity on threads and Twitter at Equity Pod. Talk to you next time. Equity is hosted by TechCrunch senior reporters and produced by Teresa Loconzola with editing by Cal. Subscribe on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts and find out what's next at techcrunch.com/events. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time.