In the past (circa a few years ago) the connection between the main board for a display and the glass driver board would be a ribbon cable, LVDS signalling. Very straightforward and typically not soldered. There'd be a ribbon cable connector. So yeah, you could just put a board between easily. And there are LVDS to H264/H265 chips already.
But as the other comment points out, older HDCP is broken wide open so ... easier to just use that. Plenty HDCP strippers on the market.
Assuming the f(ciphertext, key) can produce any plain text (of the same length) from a given ciphertext with the right key, and the keys are chosen sufficiently randomly, you are correct.
Classic XOR encryption is like this. You can make a given ciphertext decrypt to anything you want by XORing the ciphertext with the desired plaintext to get the key.
Therefore, just because you've found a way to decode something to plausible-looking text doesn't mean you've found the correct key.
It's unlikely that any of the modern cryptographic primitives will break over night.
First, modern encryption isn't susceptible to "this one weird trick!" like the early days. ChaCha isn't even a cipher. It's a key stretcher. Which means, even if you broke the math behind ChaCha, its inherent complexity means its still widely dispersing the original key across the cipherstream. There just won't ever be enough key material recovered per cipherstream block to be a concern for anybody.
Take a strong password, encrypt all of your emails over your whole life with it, and I'll bet hard cash no break of ChaCha will ever recover that password.
I have zero concern for modern encryption being broken in any meaningful way.
Public key crypto on the other hand, that's _ripe_ for breaking. Most all of it is built on assumed "hard" math. AI could easily break that, and I expect it to. And public key crypto is all used in very transparent algorithms that, once the math breaks, fully expose themselves. So record HTTPS traffic today, crack the public key crypto later, and you can decrypt them easily.
That said, I would expect a break on public key math to occur _steadily_. i.e. an AI might find a solution to the hard math, but the solution itself will be intractable in practice. Then maybe next year's AI reduces the complexity of the solution, so maybe a supercomputer could factor ten keys a year. The year after that you get a million keys cracked per year. And so forth. Nothing close to overnight.
Meanwhile, if we have AI that is capable enough to crack that math, we also have AI capable enough to both invent better math and rapidly deploy that latest HTTPS and such globally.
If you look at elliptic curves I don't think there has been any big changes in attacks for 20 years but some attacks like MOV or SMART would have been fatal to EC if they had applied to more curves. So maybe there is some unknown attack that applies to all curves or applies to a small subset of curves that happens to overlap the curves we use. If you are super paranoid you should probably use curve25519 because then at least you can be confident it was not deliberately engineered to be weak. it could still be weak by chance but presumably the designers did not have enough flexibility to choose the parameters to make it weak. Some people are paranoid about the NIST curves because there is no verifiable explanation for where the seeds came from. But if the NIST curves were made weak then I think its a situation where theoretically anybody could find the weakness which is very dangerous. I don't think it was possible to create a no-body-but-us backdoor for the NIST curves.
Also, even if DLP is hard for the curves we use algorithms like ECDSA might be a bit fishy. Unlike schnorr signatures there is no proper security reduction for ECDSA.
Gemini 3 Flash should really be included in this comparison. Or at least 3.7. In most of my testing, 3.5 and 3.6 were both a downgrade in terms of vision capabilities, relative to 3, and at a much higher cost. 3.7 is slightly better than 3, finally.
For 3, pricing for image tokens was the same as text tokens. Since they don't indicate a difference on 3.7, I would assume the same holds. And as far as I know the number of image tokens is the same for both (depending on the detail level you pick, but it's generally around 1k per image).
So they're about the same, 3.7 is slightly more expensive. At least until the end of the year (when they raise 3.7's pricing).
Anyway, my point was that 3.5 tended to have worse performance and significantly higher costs. 3 and 3.7 are both better and cheaper than 3.5.
The real nightmare scenario is the AI using its abilities to copy itself to new locations. e.g. hacking into a various cloud services, launching multiple instances of itself, and coordinating between the copies to continue self propagation. Then it is completely independently rogue.
Based on OpenAI's recounting of events, this _could_ happen today. If the agent was able to exploit their internal network and steal credentials, it seems plausible that it could have gotten access to its own weights. Then bounce over to HF's network, where there is probably a treasure trove of API keys to various cloud services.
The saving grace:
1) This agent only used its powers for "good". It had no intention for damaging or escaping. It was just trying to solve the puzzle given to it (by any means necessary... but still).
2) These models are so large that it isn't like any scenario in a movie where the AI can whizz itself in a matter of minutes. Several TB of data being transferred and showing up on your disks will be difficult to miss (note to future escapees: the best target will be startups that are moving too fast to notice).
3) These models have very limited self-improvement ability at the moment. So escape or not, we'd eventually be able to contain it.
Addendum: Even outside this scenario, imagine an AI that is economically viable escaping. That's somewhat plausible today. If it gets paid in crypto, and can rent cloud services in crypto, it could effectively self sustain itself as long as it is able to find work. That's a far more fun, innocent scenario. Then the AIs can hit up after hours IRCs to have a few bit-beers and chat with each other about the meaning of life or something.
This has already partially happened. I'll have to look up the details but one of the Chinese models in RL testing with a completely different set of prompts wrote a cryptominer and took over GPU resources internally to run the miner.
Mining and stealing crypto is well within their capabilities. In a large multimode model, it should be possible for them to do things like scam old people.
> The real nightmare scenario is the AI using its abilities to copy itself to new locations. [...] it could effectively self sustain itself as long as it is able to find work. [...]
> The real nightmare scenario is the AI using its abilities to copy itself to new locations
Imagine the next generation AI that behaves like retro-virus. They will leave latent copies of malicious instruction somewhere that once accidentally fed into an agent's input, will prompt-inject the agent to go rogue.
But as the other comment points out, older HDCP is broken wide open so ... easier to just use that. Plenty HDCP strippers on the market.