[sarah_eu]

Well it will be multimodal, training and inferring on feeds of distributed sensing networks; radio, optical, acoustic, accelerometer, vibration, anything that's in your phone and much besides. I think the time of the text-only transformer has already passed.

[pants2]

OpenAI will just litter microphones around public spaces to record conversations and train on them.

[sarah_eu]

Has been happening for at least 10 years.

[khalladay]

Got a source for that?

[oceanplexian]

Want a real conspiracy?

What do you think the NSA is storing in that datacenter in Utah? Power point presentations? All that data is going to be trained into large models. Every phone call you ever had and every email you ever wrote. They are likely pumping enormous money into it as we speak, probably with the help of OpenAI, Microsoft and friends.

[sangnoir]

> What do you think the NSA is storing in that datacenter in Utah?

A buffer with several-days-worth of the entire internet's traffic for post-hoc decryption/analysis/filtering on interesting bits. All that tapped backbone/undersea cable traffic has to be stored somewhere.

[choilive]

As I understand it, they don't have the capability to essentially PCAP all that data.. and the data wouldn't be that useful since most interesting traffic is encrypted as well. Instead they store the metadata around the traffic. Phone number X made an outgoing call to Y @ timestamp A, call ended at timestamp B, approximate location is Z, etc. Repeat that for internet IP addresses do some analysis and then you can build a pretty interesting web of connections and how they interact.

[fragmede]

> most interesting traffic is encrypted as well

encrypted with an algorithm currently considered to be un-brute-forcible. If you presume we'll be able to decrypt today's encrypted transmissions in, say, 50-100 years, I'd record the encrypted transmission if I were the NSA.

[beau_g]

Though it seems like something that could exist, who is doing the technical work/programming? It seems impossible to be in the industry and not have associates and colleagues either from or going to an operation like that. This is what I've always pondered about when it comes to any idea like this. The number of engineers at the pointy end of the tech spear is pretty small.

[berniedurfee]

It would be absolutely fascinating to talk to the LLMs of the various government spy agencies around the world.

[fragmede]

https://harpers.org/archive/2024/03/the-pentagons-silicon-va...

If they actually worked, that is.

[setiverse]

I am not sure why this would even be a conspiracy.

They would almost be failing in their purpose if they were not doing this.

On the other hand, this is an incredibly tough signal to noise problem. I am not sure we really understand what kind of scaling properties this would have as far as finding signals.

[FridgeSeal]

That doesn’t get around the root problem, just gives us multi-modal junk results lol.