The matter of the leaks were very “Snowdeny” in that it’s possibly that parts of our own government and our secret police share all Danish internet traffic with the NSA, who then in tern share information with our secret police. Which meant that our secret police could do surveillance on us as citizens through a legal loophole, as they aren’t allowed to do they directly, but are allowed to share surveillance information with the NSA. Part of this information comes from the giant American tech companies as well. Despite their promises to not share the data they keep for you. I know it’s sort of crackpot sounding, but between echelon, Snowden and the ridiculous amounts of scandals, I think it’s safe to assume that the American military wants in on LLMs and monitor all the inputs people put into ChatGPT and similar. So for that reason alone they’d want in on things.
Then there is how the war in Ukraine has shown how cheap drones are vital in modern warfare, and right now, they need to be manually controlled. But what if they didn’t? Maybe that’s not obtainable, but maybe it is.
Then there is all the other reasons you and I can’t think of. So even if they don’t believe it’s eventually going to lead to an AGI, or whatever else the hype wants, they’re still going to be interested in technology that’s already used by so many people and organisations around the globe.
For instance, neither of your examples - surveillance or automated drones - has anything to do with AGI. They don't need LLMs to do mass digital surveillance; they already do that and were doing it for decades before LLMs were a twinkle in anyone's eye. Sure, they'll try to tap into the user data generated by chatgpt etc. (and likely succeed), but that's not a different capability than what they're already doing. And automating drones - which, by the way, this is not future technology as you seem to imply, it's here today - is a special purpose ML system, that maybe benefits from incorporating an LLM somewhere, but certainly isn't pinging the chatgpt api!
But sure, you're exactly right at the end, I have no idea whether they see other angles on this that are new and promising. That's why I asked the question, I'm very curious whether there are any real indications thus far that militaries think the big public LLM models will be useful enough to them that they'll want to put a thumb on the scale to favor the companies running them over the companies that make their bucks on copyrighted content.
But for all we know intelligence services could be using LLMs for years now, since they are usually a few years ahead of everybody else in many regards :-)
How? I'm not trying to be combative, I genuinely am curious if you have an idea how these things could be usefully applied to that problem. In my experience working in the information security space, approximate techniques (neural nets, etc.) haven't gotten much traction. Deterministic detection rules are how we approach the problem of finding the needle in the hay pile. So if you have a concrete idea here that could represent an advancement in this field.
In a world where false negatives--i.e. failing to detect a sharp needle--are the worst possible failure mode, approximations need to be handled with exceeding care.
I'm sure language models and transformer techniques will be (or more likely: already are) an important part of the contemporary systems that do this stuff. But I'm skeptical that they care much about GPT-4 itself (or other general models).
I'm not skeptical about whether they think it is useful and an important capability to incorporate ML techniques into their systems, I'm unsure how much utility they see in general (the "G" in AGI) models.
I think there's a strong argument that they should be thinking in those terms, but I'm a lot less convinced that they do usually think in that way.
Or more charitably, they have the responsibility to balance current interests against future interests. And this isn't just a tricky thing for democracies, dictators also have to strike this same balance, just with different trade offs.
But in this case, for the US, it honestly isn't clear to me that policy makers should favor the AI side of this tussle. I think culture has been among the, if not the very, most important export of the US for nearly a century, and I think favorable copyright treatment has been at least part of the story with that.
Maybe that whole landscape is different now in a way that makes that whole model obsolete, but I think it's an open question at least.
What it seems to me from the milieu of everything I've read and heard (that is: I can't cite examples, this is an aggregate developed from hundreds of articles and podcasts etc.) is that there is already an "AI" arms race underway, but that it has more to do with specialized ML systems than with consumer LLMs.
But I'm not really in the loop, and maybe OpenAI really is more important to the US DoD than Disney (as a stand-in for big copyright-based businesses generally) is to the politicians they donate to. But I dunno! That's why I asked the question :)
I would be more intrigued by the national security angle of this if copyright holders were going after, say, Palantir. But I just don't know how important they see these language models as being, or how interested they are in OpenAI's mission to discover AGI.
Some of this may be a misunderstanding of what modern militaries do, if they are shooting guns there's already been some level of failure. Massive amounts of war gaming, sentiment analysis, and propagandizing occur, see the RAND Corporation for more details on the military development of algorithms and artificial intelligence.
But I also buy that there is a lot of overlap between military work and any other kind of white collar work, which LLMs are definitely useful (but not revolutionary) for.