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Notes -
I haven’t looked into the specifics of the Chinese models but the results I have seen indicate they’re achieving the same or similar results to models like Claude, open source and with less computational resources consumed overall. That’s pretty impressive if true. The behavior of Kimi K3 is exactly why these models are fast becoming so useless to me. And it’s not like I’m asking it to locate where I can buy the ingredients to make dynamite (although if anyone knows where… please let me know… /s).
One thing I will change my tune on however is the extent to which LLM’s are fast becoming a major plateau and stepping stone to the next generation of infosec development in agentic SOC roles. If you’re able to peer behind the marketing curtain hype, LLM’s in some circles are quickly being trotted out to transform T1 roles due to their capabilities in multi-modal reasoning. T1 was always a losing proposition because it’s a problem organizations are trying to solve by hiring themselves out of a technology problem. Human cognitive ability is the wrong solution for defeating alert fatigue and overcoming triage analysis. It’s like sending a cavalry charge against a machine gun. Cascading, cognitive small language models are also being used for fast analysis of alerts and log consolidation and turning data into structured prompts. Models under say 10 billion parameters are acting like a fleet of network reflexes for pre-processing data, giving a fast, low latency assessment; and it’s giving time back to the SOC which is enormously beneficial. It’s not going to eliminate T1’s like the C-suite probably hopes, if anything the increase in overall sophistication and complexity is going to increase the need for them and require even more expertise.
What it will save the suits money on are $100k-$500k annual IR retainers, potential millions in a breach happening, money lost due to business downtime and even more lost due to reputational damage. The hard part is getting that across to them for budget approval. You can’t frame it as an expense. If you say you’re putting in a request for an $800k investment to upgrade the backend because we’re currently carrying a $2.3 million risk that’s expected to grow with our current rate of expansion, that’s something they’ll understand. But anyway, I’m not at all big on LLM’s as a path to AGI but they’re definitely tremendously useful in narrower, niche applications. Infosec is one of them.
One useful application of LLMs could be translating tech concerns to C-suitese...
I’m not normally a fan of the suits, but I recognize it’s less them I dislike than it is the C-suite culture in general. I realize their jobs are hard and the good ones suffer for the publicity the bad ones get. Techies can be just as stubborn as anyone else can be, but what’s true for them is also the rub that lawyers have gotten for a long time. TrustedSec has done a lot of pentesting work for major corp’s out there, but in the pre-negotiation phase one frustration they’ve dealt with a lot is that “lawyers don’t know how to do anything other than lawyer;” which is to say they don’t understand the tech side of things. Well. Techies often don’t understand the business and economic side of the equation either.
If you speak tech to the balance sheet, they may understand what you’re saying but at no point do they understand why what you’re saying is relevant. The hardest part in talking to them is to get them to understand that you pay regardless. You don’t want your business to get vandalized? You’re going to pay higher corporate taxes for police. You want good public infrastructure? You’re going to pay a cost for that. And consumers don’t want to pay either. We know how to secure systems a lot better. It costs money… And nobody wants to pay for it. Do you want to pay 2x for all your stuff? Not really. But maybe you have to to reach the objective you need.
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