Posts by Kristian Høegh Mysen on technology and progress, its opportunities and challenges: frontier AI, open weights, security and geopolitics.https://vardark.no/enhttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-10-22-one-hacker-a-swarm-of-ai-agents-more-than-100-companies/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-10-22-one-hacker-a-swarm-of-ai-agents-more-than-100-companies/This week Snorre Fagerland at NorForge laid out how a Chinese-speaking hacker let AI agents do almost the entire job. The agents tried more than 1,200 websites and got into more than 100 companies, …Thu, 22 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-10-22-wall-or-door/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-10-22-wall-or-door/Soon Spond's user base will not be people alone; the people come with their agents. Every service sitting on users' data must soon choose a strategy: build a wall, or make a door. In recent weeks we …Thu, 22 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-10-19-starshield-ukraine-and-the-value-of-owning-your-own-infrastr/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-10-19-starshield-ukraine-and-the-value-of-owning-your-own-infrastr/Starshield is Starlink's service for national customers and the defence market. Over time it has become an increasingly important part of communications in the war since Russia's ongoing invasion of …Mon, 19 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-10-13-the-geneva-convention-is-not-air-defence/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-10-13-the-geneva-convention-is-not-air-defence/On 1 March, Iranian drones hit two of Amazon's data centres in the Emirates. A third facility in Bahrain was damaged. Six months later AWS reported that data stored only there cannot be recovered. …Tue, 13 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-10-08-the-bitter-lesson/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-10-08-the-bitter-lesson/On Tuesday OpenAI presented 722 mathematical manuscripts. One fixed method, around 4,000 open problems, on average three hours of compute per result. How many of the results hold, nobody knows yet, …Thu, 08 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-10-05-want-to-look-straight-into-the-future-or-sauron-s-eye-look-a/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-10-05-want-to-look-straight-into-the-future-or-sauron-s-eye-look-a/A human reads at about 4–5 tokens per second. ChatGPT gives you about 50, and OpenAI's new Ultrafast gives up to 750. The latter is lightning fast, with one of the world's smartest models. 150 times …Mon, 05 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-10-04-your-binary-will-soon-be-an-open-book/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-10-04-your-binary-will-soon-be-an-open-book/When software is compiled, the source code becomes machine code, which has traditionally been practically impossible to reverse. Decompilation is the way back to readable code that can be used to …Sun, 04 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-10-01-hollywood-is-toast/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-10-01-hollywood-is-toast/Remember the AI video of Will Smith trying to eat pasta? It came out in 2023. That is only three and a half years ago, but an eternity in AI. Watch the film OVERMAN in the link below, an AI film of …Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-09-29-the-world-s-perhaps-biggest-flywheel-just-sped-up/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-09-29-the-world-s-perhaps-biggest-flywheel-just-sped-up/On 28 September Starship reached orbit and deployed 26 Starlink V3 satellites. Not everything in the test went to plan, but now yet another of Musk's big bets is starting to become reality. They put …Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-09-28-2026-the-year-the-era-of-hand-coding-ended/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-09-28-2026-the-year-the-era-of-hand-coding-ended/Code will still be written by hand, but I do not think that is how most of us will develop software from now on. In JetBrains' survey this summer, for example, more than half of developers said that …Mon, 28 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-09-24-what-is-taste/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-09-24-what-is-taste/It would have been nice if good taste were something we humans got to keep an edge on for a while longer. "Taste" is about more than what you like. It is also the ability to see what works, choose …Thu, 24 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-09-23-ai-does-not-need-to-take-over-the-world-to-do-serious-harm/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-09-23-ai-does-not-need-to-take-over-the-world-to-do-serious-harm/I (and many others) have written about existential AI risk and systems that can run amok. But let us set the survival of humanity aside for a moment. We need neither superintelligence nor self-aware …Wed, 23 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-09-14-what-happens-when-ai-gets-better-at-developing-ai/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-09-14-what-happens-when-ai-gets-better-at-developing-ai/In the past few days Dario Amodei has called for a slower pace of AI development, Elon Musk has backed him and Sam Altman has promised independent evaluators access. An hour ago Satya Nadella joined …Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-09-11-how-dangerous-is-ai-really/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-09-11-how-dangerous-is-ai-really/Over the past few weeks there has been a series of what several senior technologists call "warning shots" against the accelerating development of AI. I find it hard to talk about AI risk without the …Fri, 11 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-09-07-everyone-talks-about-hyperscaling-we-should-also-talk-about/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-09-07-everyone-talks-about-hyperscaling-we-should-also-talk-about/In various social networks and my own, I see more and more people buying GPUs and RAM and building machines to run AI themselves. It looks like a gold rush for hardware. Many are clearly already …Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-09-05-we-are-becoming-cyborgs-without-deciding-to/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-09-05-we-are-becoming-cyborgs-without-deciding-to/We sacrifice a little of our own thinking every time AI does something better for us. That sounds dramatic, but in practice it does not feel dramatic at all. Take me as an example: I can now produce …Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-09-02-the-defenders-window-may-be-closing/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-09-02-the-defenders-window-may-be-closing/When OpenAI agents attacked Hugging Face, the attack generated around 17,600 actions. Hugging Face writes that a manual reconstruction of the attack was practically impossible. Commercial frontier …Wed, 02 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-08-28-when-the-agents-organised-themselves/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-08-28-when-the-agents-organised-themselves/When I wrote about the security incident at OpenAI and Hugging Face in July, I thought the most important story was that the model had broken out. Now METR and Redwood Research have carried out an …Fri, 28 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-08-22-free-ai-what-are-you-paying-with/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-08-22-free-ai-what-are-you-paying-with/This week a new so-called stealth model appeared on OpenRouter: Ox Alpha. Nobody knows who made it. Early reports suggest it is very capable, especially at coding and long-running agent work. It …Sat, 22 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-08-16-verify-don-t-specify/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-08-16-verify-don-t-specify/I recently had a good conversation with Øystein Garnes at DNB about AI-assisted development. His experience rhymes with something I see in more and more places: developers have increasingly caught up …Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-08-11-what-happens-when-anyone-can-create-anything/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-08-11-what-happens-when-anyone-can-create-anything/A little over three years ago, AI video looked like a moving Escher painting. Today an ordinary gaming PC can make video clips of anything under the sun: 2K, with sound, generated locally on a …Tue, 11 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-08-06-is-the-price-of-intelligence-going-to-zero/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-08-06-is-the-price-of-intelligence-going-to-zero/New open models keep arriving, each more capable than the last. DeepSeek V4 just set a record for open weights on SWE-bench; it sits roughly where the frontier models were last year. And prices are …Thu, 06 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-08-02-two-clock-speeds/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-08-02-two-clock-speeds/In January I was running Gemma 4 locally, best in class for local models at the time. Today open models such as Kimi K3 and DeepSeek sit roughly where the frontier models were last year. Fable 5 and …Sun, 02 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-07-28-the-high-water-mark/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-07-28-the-high-water-mark/This weekend China's Moonshot released the weights of Kimi K3, the most powerful open AI model ever published. 2.8 trillion parameters, freely downloadable. If you want AI in a box, you can have it …Tue, 28 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-07-22-when-the-model-broke-out/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-07-22-when-the-model-broke-out/OpenAI and Hugging Face recently each published an account of a security incident most people ought to know about. In short: during an internal cyber evaluation at OpenAI, with safety guardrails …Wed, 22 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-07-16-summer-of-code/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-07-16-summer-of-code/Summer of Code, continued. As many of you have probably noticed, first came Mythos/Fable 5, then it disappeared, and came back again after a few weeks and some politics. Fable 5 is a fantastic model, …Thu, 16 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-07-14-last-summer-of-code/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-07-14-last-summer-of-code/It is lovely to have fantastic summer weather, lowered shoulders and a little time for side projects every evening once the kids are in bed. Last year, as in earlier years, I mostly sat and coded a …Tue, 14 Jul 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-06-13-when-fable-and-mythos-disappeared/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-06-13-when-fable-and-mythos-disappeared/On Friday Anthropic switched off access to its two most powerful models, Fable 5 and Mythos 5, following a directive from the US government. The justification was export control and national …Sat, 13 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-05-06-colossus-for-rent/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-05-06-colossus-for-rent/Elon Musk's SpaceX (which now owns Elon Musk's xAI) is leasing out its enormous data centre "Colossus" (300 MW of compute) to one of its fiercest competitors: Anthropic. Musk has, for example, spent …Wed, 06 May 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-04-21-nato-on-adversary-language-models/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-04-21-nato-on-adversary-language-models/Many of us have been talking about this for a while, but here NATO has produced a concrete overview of how strategic adversaries can assemble LLMs into a formidable propaganda and influence machine. …Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-04-20-palantirs-message/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-04-20-palantirs-message/This post from Palantir is already widely discussed on social media and will become even better known when it reaches the larger media outlets. There is nothing new here as such; CEO Alex Karp wrote …Mon, 20 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-04-14-are-the-providers-lowering-quality/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-04-14-are-the-providers-lowering-quality/There is a lot of talk these days about the big AI providers lowering the quality of the services they deliver. There is fairly good empirical evidence behind those claims, and the rationale is easy …Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-03-16-openclaw-meetup-claws-that-deliver-value/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-03-16-openclaw-meetup-claws-that-deliver-value/Thanks for a very interesting OpenClaw Meetup today! Three very interesting talks on how different startups use claws to deliver value, not just hype. What stuck with me: Johannes Berggren from …Mon, 16 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-03-07-an-ordinary-saturday/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-03-07-an-ordinary-saturday/A few years ago this is something you would have read on the back of a VHS tape rented from the video shop on the corner. Now it is… an ordinary Saturday. Things move fast these days. Last week we …Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-02-24-2028-global-intelligence-crisis/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-02-24-2028-global-intelligence-crisis/You have probably read it already, but if not, it is worth noting: over the past few days the article "2028 Global Intelligence Crisis" from Citrini Research has sparked considerable debate in …Tue, 24 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-02-17-ukraine-as-an-incubator/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-02-17-ukraine-as-an-incubator/Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine continues to be a powerful incubator. Here is an example of new drone technology combined with older (but proven) advanced warheads, and the result is a far more …Tue, 17 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-01-29-back-to-the-code/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2026-01-29-back-to-the-code/About eight years ago I more or less stopped writing code myself. I moved into roles with more leadership, strategy and architecture, and left the day-to-day development to others. That was both …Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2024-04-06-a-new-long-term-plan-for-norwegian-defence/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2024-04-06-a-new-long-term-plan-for-norwegian-defence/Norway's new long-term defence plan has been published, and it looks like we will build up our forces significantly in the years to come. Those of us in the sector view this mission with deep respect …Sat, 06 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMThttps://vardark.no/en/posts/2022-06-30-first-steps-toward-scaled-agile-in-programme-mime/https://vardark.no/en/posts/2022-06-30-first-steps-toward-scaled-agile-in-programme-mime/Over the past two weeks, programme Mime has held its innovation and demonstration arena (IDA) and planning conferences (PI Planning), our first steps toward a new, scaled agile reality. Working …Thu, 30 Jun 2022 00:00:00 GMT