Modern Wisdom

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Ex-Military Hacker: The Secret World Of Government Surveillance - Bill Thompson - #1131

Explore episode Aug 1, 2026

Where this was said

How AI Is Supercharging Hacking

At 33:36 · chapter starts 32:07

The episode's most technically alarming section opens with a straightforward question: what's AI's role in hacking now? Bill describes a transformed workflow: feed a device's firmware, hardware specs, and software to an AI, ask it where the vulnerabilities are, and get answers in hours that would have taken a year of manual analysis before. A year-long phone forensic project — dump the phone, get the E01 image, comb through the code — now probably takes 3 hours of substantive work at most. The target development cycle that previously required months of tradecraft now runs on a Sunday afternoon. More alarming is the off-grid version: people with server farms in their basement can train custom AI models on private code exploit repositories with no guardrails. Bill says organized crime is absolutely doing this already. He closes with a key historical note: the mathematics behind convolutional neural networks and LSTMs were understood in the 1970s and 80s — the AI revolution happened when GPU compute and internet training data finally matched the math that was already on the shelf.

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