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I don't think there is much overlap between people capable of building cutting edge LLM's and the people who want to build a cutting edge LLM for the government.

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The NSA managed to deliberately insert a backdoor into elliptic-curve cryptography right under the noses of everyone capable of making elliptic-curve cryptography.

I wouldn't count them out.

Mathematicians in academia are paid a little less than AI researchers. Companies are willing to pay billions to steal the few people capable of driving development of frontier LLMs from each other. Cryptographers don't quite enjoy the same popularity.

Does getting paid more make people smarter?

Especially academia tend to do their work out of interest, their monetary gain isn't their primary goal

When people with a particular aptitude and skillset can make 10x as much money doing job A than job B, there is a bias towards job A.

Of course, that doesn’t mean nobody will do job B for other, non-financial reasons.

> The NSA managed to deliberately insert a backdoor into elliptic-curve cryptography right under the noses of everyone capable of making elliptic-curve cryptography.

That sort of proves the opposite point, assuming you're referring to Dual EC DRBG, because the flaw was noticed very early on, by people who weren't even involved in its development.

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