The NSA’s Large Language Models

> "Will Hurd, an OpenAI board member, was a former CIA clandestine officer for nearly nine years. He was a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence member during his tenure as a U.S. Rep. Mr. Hurd is also a member of the board of trustees of In-Q-Tel, the primary external investment arm of the CIA and the broader US Intelligence Community."

Last month someone made a throwaway to say this in a reply to something I wrote.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35366484

My conspiracy theory was that the $10B from Microsoft is actually from the government/military/intelligence through its dark external investment arms as part of the Sydney Project, the 21st century's Manhattan Project for superhuman machine cognition.

A good speculation. Among the conclusions is:

"In a certain sense, LLMs do not represent a groundbreaking change in terms of the capabilities of a well-funded intelligence agency. They merely lower the cost."

In a sense, this recapitulates the productivity pitch. They also point out the influence operations, although I am not sure whether such things will make any difference as the information space is already so crowded with garbage.