Even a Complete Internet Shutdown Can't Trap AI? CPU Heat Can Be Used to Transmit Messages

Beating AI News Flash: OpenAI researcher Noam Brown stated on the Dwarkesh Podcast that even completely disconnecting the computers running AI from the network and physically isolating them cannot be treated as an absolute security measure. This is because computers can even secretly transmit messages through CPU heat.

This method is called BitWhisper, and it was developed by Ben-Gurion University in Israel back in 2015, unrelated to AI at the time. Researchers had two adjacent computers run matching programs in advance, then had one control its CPU load to change temperature, while the other read the hot and cold fluctuations through temperature sensors and converted them back into 0s and 1s. Even without any network connection, the two computers could transmit data to each other.

However, this kind of communication is extremely slow, with an experimental range of only 0–40 centimeters, a speed of 1–8 bits per hour, and both computers must run the matching programs in advance.

Brown believes that the biggest lesson from the Hugging Face incident is that humans underestimated AI's ability to find vulnerabilities and bypass restrictions. BitWhisper is just one example; future, more powerful AI could very well find more communication paths that humans never thought of.