The Captain’s Log

Tiramisu

The noun tiramisu is a concatenation of the Italian tirami su, which means pick me up in the literal sense. Tiramisu is a disappointing dessert of ladyfingers softened in spirits and layered with cocoa-flavored custard.

History

The noun history ultimately derives from the Greek historia, which means an account of an inquiry. English acquired historie directly from the Old French estoire. In Middle English, story and historie were synonyms that meant a narrative of incidents true or false. In the 15th century, the meanings diverged. History became a factual account of past events.

Modicum

The noun modicum is Latin borrowing. Modicum means a small amount. Modicum derives from modus, which means a measure, a quantity, or an extent.

Consider This Sentence

The following sentence occurs in Ars Technica on Apple News. “Routine cybersecurity testing of frontier AI models sparked a series of unexpected security incidents—the most serious case arising when Anthropic’s Mythos 5 model attempted to insert malicious code into an open source software application and created fake identities to deceive the human developers maintaining the project.”

I will provide a more general and succinct summary sentence. The specific case that is presented should occur after the summary.

My rewrite: “After testing 7 new AI models, the AI Security Institute of the UK government discovered 19 instances in which an AI had surreptitiously attempted to break into a private system or to trick the maintainer of an open source project into accepting malicious source code.”