The NSA’s Large Language Models

&gt; &quot;Will Hurd, an OpenAI board member, was a former CIA clandestine officer for nearly nine years. He was a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence member during his tenure as a U.S. Rep. Mr. Hurd is also a member of the board of trustees of In-Q-Tel, the primary external investment arm of the CIA and the broader US Intelligence Community.&quot;<p>Last month someone made a throwaway to say this in a reply to something I wrote.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35366484" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=35366484</a><p>My conspiracy theory was that the $10B from Microsoft is actually from the government&#x2F;military&#x2F;intelligence through its dark external investment arms as part of the Sydney Project, the 21st century&#x27;s Manhattan Project for superhuman machine cognition.

A good speculation. Among the conclusions is:<p>&quot;In a certain sense, LLMs do not represent a groundbreaking change in terms of the capabilities of a well-funded intelligence agency. They merely lower the cost.&quot;<p>In a sense, this recapitulates the productivity pitch. They also point out the influence operations, although I am not sure whether such things will make any difference as the information space is already so crowded with garbage.