Comment by BiscuitBadger

18 hours ago

There have to be GovCloud only LLMs just for this case.

I swear this government is headed by appointed nephews of appointed nephews.

I keep thinking back about that Chernobyl miniseries; head of the science department used to run a shoe factory. No one needs to be competent at their job anymore

The article says

> [ChatGPT] is blocked for other Department of Homeland Security staff. Gottumukkala “was granted permission to use ChatGPT with DHS controls in place,” adding that the use was “short-term and limited.”

He had a special exemption to use it as head of Cyber and still got flagged by cybersecurity checks. So obviously they don't think it's safe to use broadly.

They already have a deal with OpenAI to build a government focused one https://openai.com/global-affairs/introducing-chatgpt-gov/

  • > So obviously they don't think it's safe to use broadly.

    More likely, everything gets added to the list because there shouldn't be false positives, it's worth investigating to make sure there isn't an adjacent gap in the security systems.

    • You are uploading information to the chat system every time you use it. Doubly true if you’re having it analyze or work with documents.

      I presume pulling this data out is simple if you’re, say, China.

      There really no security to investigate. Without a private instance, it’s an absolute non-starter for anything classified.

      2 replies →

  • Somehow I think that the weak link in our government security is at the top - the President, his cabinet, and various heads of agencies. Because nobody questions what they're allowed to do, and so they're exempt from various common-sense security protocols. We already saw some pretty egregious security breaches from Pete Hegseth.

> No one needs to be competent at their job anymore

That's actually the whole point. Placing incompetents in positions of authority means they know absolutely to whom they owe their loyalty. Because they know they would never have that job on merit. And since they don't really know how to do the job, they have no moral qualms about doing a poor job, or strong opinions on what they should be doing -- other than whatever mission their patron has given them. It's a tool used by weak leaders and it's unfortunately very effective.

It's all part of the plan.

Make the government look so incompetent that it is a no brainer to let a private company (headed by your friends and family of course) to do the important jobs and siphon resources much more effectively.

> I swear this government is headed by appointed nephews of appointed nephews.

No joke, the previous head of the State Department task force tasked with fighting corruption and nepotism in international contracting was named Rich Nephew. (He's a very talented career civil servant and I mean no shade I just find that hilarious.)

Guess what this administration would love to do with nuclear facilities...

Any time you have to include "competent" in a description of a job or related technology, that's a clue that it needs requisite oversight and (possibly exponetial) proportionate cost.

Hey, working at a shoe factory is serious business. You have to be a real bootlicker to get ahead in a place like that.

  • And when you get to the top, you actually experience how the shoe is on the other foot. One should get out early, not waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Isn't using azure openai enough? I read their docs and they have self hosted instances for corporate data compliance.

DEI in action (funny people thst voted for this were apparently anti-DEI and now they get 100% DEI)

  • Of course this comment is mostly ironic, but noting for the whole class, when the MAGA talked about DEI they only ever meant ethnic and sexual minorities, competence be damned!

    That is of course the thing about ideologies like it: loyalty before all else.

They say that most fascist governments fall apart because they actively despise competence, which it turns out you need if you are trying to run a country.

  • They say it, but they're wrong. Historically speaking there have been basically about 2 fascist governments, and they fell because they lost wars. And Germany, for one, did run them with high competence, to the extend that it took years for many countries to do anything about.

    It we loosen "fascist" to just mean any authoritarian government, there are many that run of very long time.

    • WWII started in 1939 and was done in early 1945, so it didn't take that long.

      More importantly, maybe the Nazi's were competent at first, but they absolutely fell apart internally due to mistrust, back stabbing, and demanding of loyalty above all else. Hitler famously made many poor military decisions.

      1 reply →

  • That’s because eventually reality catches up to you.

    If the reality of a thing is in opposition to the regime’s wishes, you can’t just wish that away.

    However, the regime will favor those who say “yes” over those who accept reality.

  • Competence gives way to ideology.

    I once read an interesting book on the economy of Nazi Germany. There were a lot of smart CEOs and high ranking civil servants who perfectly predicted US industrial might.

> There have to be GovCloud only LLMs just for this case.

I hear Los Alamos labs has an LLM that makes ChatGPT look like a toy. And then there's Sentinel, which may be the same thing I'm not sure.