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Comment by spaceman_2020 | Hacker News Reader

spaceman_2020

A little off-topic, but does anyone wonder what kind of AI tech the CIA or DARPA or the NSA might have? Or what they might be building?

It's a little scary that a small private company could create an AI that has dominated headlines for over a month now. Surely, the folks at NSA, who have more data than anyone else, have taken notice and are working on something of their own.

Am I being paranoid about a potential tool that lists out a bunch of names and addresses for queries like "list of people who have said X about Y online"?

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I've seen a lot of people worrying about "what will China do with LLMs?" But my question is: how do you know they don't have them already? What if they've been deployed on the internet for the past three years?

I guess the same logic can apply to CIA, NSA, DARPA, etc.

But you can take solace in the fact that most government organizations are pretty inept. It used to be common understanding that the military/intelligence apparatus had a 20-year head start on private industry, but I don't believe that's been true for a while now. The internet made knowledge sharing too open for it to be feasible to keep cutting edge research cloaked in secrecy.

For the same reason, I don't believe the US military has some kind of anti-gravity UAP propulsion. It just strains incredulity too much.

I'd also argue the disparity in compensation between private companies and government agencies pushes top engineering talent to the former.

Definitely. I think there is one exception though, which is advanced weapon manufacturers like Lockheed Martin. They're a private company, so they can compete on salary, but they're also a government contractor, building technology that could only be used by military. You won't see Google building stealth fighter jets, for example. So if an advanced physicist wants to work on cutting edge tech, they're more likely to end up at a place like that for their whole career. But even aerospace isn't immune from the private sector, as SpaceX has shown.

> But you can take solace in the fact that most government organizations are pretty inept.

This is literally the thing that they've been trying to convince you of. Remember Snowden? If not, why not?

So, at least their propaganda wing is working great.

P.S. also, US federal agencies tend to be uniquely stupid, largely due to starve-the-beast politics.

It is not a universal truth. Americans always base their opinions of state institutions in general on their experience with institutions of the American state.

Other countries can & do have actually-effective apparatus, often terrifyingly so.

See, for example, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/30/technology/police-surveil...

Its pretty simple, there aren't thousands of missing GPUs that would be required for an agency to be training massive models on and there aren't hundreds of the best PhD students disappearing while working somewhere in the DC Metro Area. They don't seem to have the hardware and they certainly don't seem to have the brainpower either.

Not at all off topic because any slow down on public research just lets all such shadow actors get even further ahead.

We have to guess that top level intel agencies probably had gpt 5+ level LLMs for several years potentially. I’ve been wondering if that is actually partially why the propaganda wars or social media games have really escalated between nation states.

In other words that sense of things been getting weird recently might not only be us all getting old, but they actually had this level of LLM tech already.

Guess based on what? Soldiers are posting nuclear manuals to online flash card building tools. You think there'd be zero leaks about the existence of a GPT5 level thing? Let alone someone noticing that "hey, the NSA bought a lot of high end Nvidia GPUs lately, i wonder why".

How do you account for the supersonic fighter jet they have kept secret successfully but we now suspect actually exists?

I think they can be very successful in keeping most projects secret and yes the NSA has and does buy crazy amounts of hardware including GPUs and we even know they have various ASICs for a lot of things.

Occasionally there are leaks here and there you mention. But overall the secrecy rate is pretty high in my opinion.

It is entirely possible that OpenAI is part of some CIA/DARPA initiative and that we are all doing a fantastical job of bootstrapping it to sentience by using their ChatGPT product offering (i.e. RLHF).

Darpa has the NNN program for non-invasive brain machine interface. Once the hardware is in place, we can plug into any AI system

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