The Fallacy of Artificial General Intelligence: Microsoft's Recognition of the Limits of LLMs

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  Microsoft released a research work last week [1] that claims that GPT-4 capabilities can be viewed as an early version of Artificial General Intelligence. The authors states that " the breadth and depth of GPT -4's capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system. "  The researchers adopted the following definition of human Intelligence to reach this conclusion: " a very general mental capability that, among other things, involves the ability to reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience. ". According to the same paper, the definition was proposed in 1994 by a group of psychologists. Interestingly, the authors of the paper [1] acknowledges that the definition of human intelligence is somehow restrictive. They also acknowledge that some components of this definition are currently missing
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RootAsRole: Tool to replace sudo/su for Linux

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Traditionally, administering Linux systems is based on the existence of one powerful user (called super user) who detains alone the full list of system’s privileges. This vision has been criticized because all programs executed in the context of the super user obtain much more privileges than they need. For example, tcpdump, a tool for sniffing network packets, needs only the privilege cap_net_raw to run. However, by executing it in the context of super user, tcpdump obtains the full list of systems’ privileges. Thus, the traditional approach of Linux administration breaks the principle of the least privilege that ensures that a process must have the least privileges necessary to perform its job (i.e. sniff packet networks). An attacker may exploit vulnerabilities of tcpdump to compromise the whole system, when the process of tcpdump possesses the full list of root privileges. Root As Role (RAR) module implements a role based approach for distributing Linux capabilities into Linux users. Our module contains a tool called sr (switch role) that allows users to control the list of privileges they give to programs. Thus, with our module Linux users can stop using sudo and su commands that don't allow controlling the list of privileges to give to programs. There are already some tools that permit to control the list of privileges to give to programs such as setcap and pam_cap module. However, these tools necessitate the use of extended attributes to store privileges. Storing privileges in extended attributes causes many different problems (see below motivation scenarios). Our module allows assigning Linux capabilities without the need to store the Linux capabilities in the extended attributes of executable files. Our work leverages a new capability set added to Linux kernel, called Ambient Set. Using RAR module, administrators can group a set of Linux capabilities in roles and give them to their users. For security reasons, users don’t get the attributed roles by default, they should activate them using the command sr (switch role). Our module is compatible with pam_cap.so. So administrators can continue using pam_cap.so along with our module. Finally, RAR module includes a tool called capable, this tool helps Linux users to know the privileges that an application asks for. More info here https://github.com/SamerW/RootAsRole

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