“It seems like a bozo model can probably hack your infrastructure. It doesn't really take much. I think the bar is surprisingly low. … It's kind of like a drone, you know, like it costs, you know, a hundred bucks to fly the drone into the tanker. And it costs like, you know, like $2 million to shoot the drone out of the sky or something. That dynamic, I think, is very replicated in AI as well. Meaning, defense costs probably an order of magnitude more than an attack.”
TBPN · Startups & Venture · October 2026
Context
Asked by the hosts how much compute matters in the current wave of AI-driven cyberattacks. O'Laughlin says his team has looked at the attack side and the raw token cost is pitiful, around $100, and that it's in everyone's interest not to talk about how low the bar is.
Transcript
Yeah, the points that he's making are self-serving, but it also makes sense that a lender would rather lend to somebody that has revenue that's diversified. So it's like, he can be trying to further his own interests while at the same time, having a pretty coherent thought that both stands through.
…How much is it actual inference of DeepSeek, as you mentioned, versus just piggybacking on cyber different exploits that have been discovered by other folks? How relevant is compute in the cybersecurity battles that we're seeing playing out right now? Do you have a grapple on that yet, Doug?
I mean, I think compute's pretty relevant here because it seems like a bozo model can probably hack your infrastructure. It doesn't really take much. I think the bar is surprisingly low. And I think it's in all of our interests not to talk about how low the bar is, if I'm going to be honest with you. And I think the other, like, it's like surprisingly low. The other thing I think that's also really kind of messed up is how asymmetric it is. It's kind of like a drone, you know, like it costs, you know, a hundred bucks to fly the drone into the tanker. And it costs like, you know, like $2 million to shoot the drone out of the sky or something. That dynamic, I think, is very replicated in AI as well. Meaning, defense costs probably an order of magnitude more than an attack. We've done some work on the attack side. The attack side, like the raw tokens that come out of it, it's like pitiful. It's like $100 or something. It doesn't take a lot.
Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah,
it's such an interesting problem because we were talking earlier on the show of like, does there need to be like large-scale white hat bounties, you know, billions of dollars allocated to like incentivize good people to go after and find these vulnerabilities, but at the same time, imagine…
the obliterated models, like they can do the hack, but like you also shouldn't trust them, if that makes sense. Like you don't really trust their incentives to like actually listen to like the same problem of like steering it a little different also means that it could be doing things that you…
More from TBPN
