“At Calif, we think we are entering the era of the centaur hackers. Basically, the best hacker right now is a combination of AI and humans. … AI is powerful. It can hack anything, but it still requires a human expert. And we don't know how long this is going to last. Maybe three months. Maybe we come back here and by the end of the year, we tell you we retire now. There's nothing else for us to do. Maybe it lasts three years.”
sputnikintelligence.com
Asked what it is like to be a hacker in the age of AI, Duong compared it to chess, where the human-plus-computer "centaur" was the best player for about ten years after Deep Blue but only about three after AlphaGo. He suggests hacking may be in that same short window now.
…at a machine speed. And it was like mind-blowing, right? Because how could you defend against that? Like in the past, we were telling our clients, you know, you have to invest in detection. Well, what would, how can you help yourself? If you see it, you can detect it, but there's a hundred of them.
Noted, we have a hundred hackers in our system right now. It's not really helpful.
Exactly. How could you do it, right? And then you have to shut down everything. But shut down is not an option because you are a bank. So that's actually requires to sit down and think about how to redesign like defense system, right? What we have right now is not working very well. But to come back to your question, like as a hacker, you know, how does it feel? I love history. So I always come back to history to say, like, does it happen before? It is actually did happen with chess, for example. You remember like in 1997, you know, IBM DeepLoo defeated Gary Gasparo. That was a big moment, right? And then 20 years later, Anfa Go defeated like Lizido in the game of Go. But those two moments are actually quite different. Like the first moment, the DeepLoo moment, after Deep Loo, the best chess player wasn't a computer because DeepLoo was a mainframe, right? Not something that you can run on your computer. And it took 10 years for someone to go from Deep Loo to develop a computer software that you can run on your computer that defeated everybody. But the 10 years, it took 10 years. During that 10 years, the best chess player was a Centaur player. This is a term coined by Gary Kasparo. It's a combination of…
Protein that makes our brains get bigger. All right. Well, Ty and Bruce from Calif. Thank you so much for showing us. That was a lot of fun. You're both
excellent. Thank you both.
Thanks. Thanks, Joe.