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Comment by baq | Hacker News Reader

NSA should be training their own GPT-4 or better model as we speak and should have been doing it for a long while now. Anything else is borderline incompetence.

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NSA can't hire the right talent capable of producing that product for the same reason they have trouble finding white-hat security people to hire: You can't work for the government and do drugs in your personal time. Enough of the pie of elite researchers are in to wacky mind-bending that it's a real recruitment problem.

Also, imagine the public shitstorm when people see headlines that NSA has overturned their policy against microdosing. They're not gonna understand what tf is going on and trying to explain it away sure af isn't gonna happen because they'll always believe that all drugs are bad and defending zero tolerance policies are the hallmark of being one of "the good guys".

You don't think compensation is the bigger issue?

And given the volume of data they likely sift through, I'd also expect them to want very small, high-throughput models for identifying targets for larger models to examine.

On the flip side, LLMs must give the NSA a new challenge: a flood of garbage text generated by no-one in particular. Perhaps there will be more effort to put surveillance directly on-device as tapping networks yields more noise.

On the grasping side, they are probably in the best position to train a GPT-5, given the amount and type of data they're presumed to have.

I’d expect they’re using huge models to train many small ones, one for each threat actor. Those small models could decide whether their actor is detected, or it’s time to slot in a different one.

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