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Comment by LPisGood | Hacker News Reader

I’ve heard of “blue suiters” for air force brass, but never blue badgers.

Anyways, isn’t NSA one of the largest employers of mathematicians in the world? Surely they’re doing something useful.

Blue badges were for government employees (like I was), and green badges were for private contractors. And yes they have a lot of math and physics guys; my own physics lecturer was in my orientation class, actually. He was there for quantum computing, which reinforces my point. The government can be good at pioneering unproven / uncommercialized technologies, but in general they are like a blunt weapon; the profit motive and lack of bureaucracy eventually makes the private sector far better for improving the technology later. In the case of LLMs, they didn't even originate in government, and I don't think there's any chance they are being developed there at a more advanced level.

Cryptography, I guess? Not really related to LLMs...

Crypto and AI are deeply connected, and you see similar structures/problems in both. Shannon, the “Father (or whatever) of AI”, worked for the NSA and published many papers there that were later declassified.

Here is a banger quote on this by Shannon’s boy Warren Weaver, keeping in mind LLMs came from translation problems:

“One naturally wonders if the problem of translation could conceivably be treated as a problem in cryptography. When I look at an article in Russian, I say: 'This is really written in English, but it has been coded in some strange symbols. I will now proceed to decode.”

> Crypto and AI are deeply connected, and you see similar structures/problems in both.

I mean yes, in both deal with information theory.

That's a long way from any practical insight.

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