Why do you think there was a mass surveillance of American domestic communications since forever ago, as leaked by Snowden? This technology has been available since then and can effectively summarize millions of pieces of communication.
GPT-like systems will close that gap, and then comes all of the problems of automated law enforcement - Extrapolation from incomplete data, false positives from coindicences, interpretation errors, all that annoying stuff
They've created a huge library of unorganized data. The difference here is they now can spawn a million untiring AI private investigators / librarians to organize this information into coherent "case files".
At least for me, until this point I've had a feeling of anonymity in the idea that, while my data is being slurped up, I'm just one data point in a sea of other 'normal' people. There would be little value in spending government time and effort tying all of the web detritus together for me. The juice would definitely not be worth the squeeze.
However, when the cost of this effort is nearly zero, that now becomes a different story. The balance of power between government and the people it rules is going to radically shift.
not exactly. Where do you think all those budget trillions that don't have to be accounted for goes into? the FBI+NSA (=CIA but for citzens) have infinite resources.
All the overhead they have is to make sure a small subset of the citizens are not impacted. Snowden goes into this in some detail when talking about day to day operations. The norm is to extend the net as wide as possible, until you reach some politician or government agency.
No, it hasn't lol.
Take drones for example. The government got really good at those because they made them jet-powered (lol) and blew a bunch of money on server-grade FPGA’s in each one of them.
You can’t really just buy a lot of GPUs to make an LLM work, you need iterative development of architecture and training methods.
Like maybe the government invented self-attention before 2017, but if they didn’t, then the constraint is training time, and the government has the same number of seconds as the rest of us.
Everything you use is from the military.
The government is good at lying, and making themselves ‘appear’ incompetent.
They secretly probably have a much further advanced quantum computer. Your viewpoint is limited to mainstream technology and mainstream science.
The military invented the nuclear bomb yes. But Fermi did most of his thinking work in Italy before the Manhattan project. He got money thrown at him once he got here.
As for semiconductor devices, it was Bell Labs and TI.
Coding is an ambiguous concept that wasn’t really invented, but if it were, it would have first appeared in programmable looms.
The military likes to take credit for things, but really all they do is throw money at existing inventions.
I’m sure they’re throwing a bunch of money at Transformers now, but who are all these uncredited super geniuses who invent things and then let randos at Google take the credit/earn the money?
They made some mistakes in the 40's and 50's to where they had nuclear secrets stolen by the Russians. And ever since has been hyper compartmentalized.
It would not surprise me if in the 90's or 00's they had an internal working LLM, considering all the puzzle pieces. You will never hear about classified tech unless it's a bomb, gets leaked. (See code breaking machines declassed after 70+ years)
In a hypothetical scenario, a military organization might want to conceal its use of a large language model (LLM) for intelligence gathering and analysis.
Another scenario is the military's current interest in everything quantum. Quantum computers for example (you wouldn't want another nation being first and pirate baying out our secrets, would you) so there is an extreme national security importance of being first.
And to be first, you need to have the smart people, which the military has. There is a reason China struggles with jet engines 80 years after their invention, and still can't make nuclear carriers. While the US navy works on things like this: https://www.navair.navy.mil/foia/sites/g/files/jejdrs566/fil...
Jet engines can be solved with money.
The actual steps of making an LLM require complex math and you can’t just pay people to make better math.
And if you could, wouldn’t those people decamp for industry and become literal trillionares?
So your implication is that the military is full of unnamed linear algebra, systems engineering, and linguistics super geniuses and these people never leave, never talk about their work publicly, never publish anything ever, and they're all cool with their huge innovations being kept away from the public forever? All because military IP regulation?
And none of these effective state prisoners ever defect to China (where they could live like royalty) because...
If that is your angle, I very much agree it's possible some deep black project exists that (once) looked into this. In the UFO lore, there are many stories about these advances (tr3b etc).
But all of it is orthogonal to LLMs though. Picking one exceptional area that the military is great at (aerospace) does not suddenly make the military exceptional in other areas like AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wU7nPDcTuY&t
See above video, even code breaking machines are kept a dark secret. LLM's that could make analytical decisions about war and strategy, must have started with the military first. It explains its massive data gathering operations in the 2000's. And it explains why some countries separation to make their own internet, away from what really is the US-Owned World Wide Web.
U.S. military has engaged in the commercialization of top-secret technologies (after it's considered obsolete by military standards), often by collaborating with private companies or research institutions.
Even the Manhattan project had nuclear research going on in public universities at the time.
Nothing of the sort here for the attention mechanism which underpins LLMs we know today.
Fundamental research isn't something you just throw money at and acquire. All we had back then were cleverbot and other expert systems.
The military is responsible for most the technology we use and talk about today. The government may appear incompetent, but we’re living off military hand-me-downs, the entire world is
If today's hardware was available 20 yrs ago, this would've been possible just like the moon landing could've been faked if it took place 20+ yrs later. The technology wasn't available at the time (GPUs in this case, and generally no experience in doing such advanced trick techniques for movies back then)
These models are having such a strong effect now because we've finally got the hardware to run them
They are not deep learning/neural nets.
Also fun fact as a pedant tax: Symantec is so named because they started out as transcription software, hit a wall, and pivoted to security SW.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/us-spy-op...
[2] https://boingboing.net/2015/06/22/gchqs-psy-ops-squad-target...
Because the hardware has not existed.
This said by accident I've seen hardware that was brought to a testing company by federal marshals that was massively parallel custom hardware that was likely for signal processing a lot of channels at once. So there is plenty of custom hardware out there, but these items have not been produced at the scale needed (from what anyone can tell) and, again from what we can tell, they don't have the general processing capability that GPU/TPU driven LLMs have.