Comment by segmondy
6 hours ago
Serious question, do you realize that the NSA are mere mortals? Do you realize how much it takes to train a model? Does the NSA make their own chips or planes? The NSA buys a lot of technology because they can't make their own.
You mean "Rhetorical question," and I didn't need patronising.
They have at least one pretty vast, largely classified data centre in Utah, with a sizeable chunk of the black budget and they also have pretty large data sets.
Whats in Utah is data storage.
NSA has had their own supercomputing program for decades. they design and produce their own large scale machines. chips, fabrics, arithmetic units, all of it. they also employ quite a number of hardcore mathematicians, computer scientists, and systems wranglers. if they decided it was of strategic importance there is absolutely no reason they couldn't train their own models.
I guess we're just conspiracy theorists for landing at the objective conclusion that three letter government agencies:
- find "modern AI" to have strategic importance
- have ways to spend loads of money while having a front-facing budget on the record
- could be running a PR program to have Americans think they "buy" access to models like they do, but the AI companies were taken over by these agencies long ago
Look at Google, Microsoft...Apple got away with it by having as much on-device operation as possible so they could wash their hands, honestly saying "We don't have it."
This is the world's largest data gathering operation. Remember after 9/11 when the NSA copied as much Internet back bone traffic as they could?
I'm not for or against, even as a resident, but we certainly shouldn't be naive.
as someone who actually worked at the NSA pointed out earlier in this thread, they have plenty of resources, but also plenty of politics and some execution problems. so I wouldn't put money on them making a great model, but to say that they are completely incapable of doing anything is probably quite wrong.
the issue here that is a forgone conclusion, regardless of where the model comes from and which chips it runs on, is that now they can reasonably comb through all the stuff that they've been collecting. that's a pretty huge operational change.