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by __blockcipher__ 730 days ago
It's less about the NSA having AI capabilities and more the inverse - the NSA having access to people's chatGPT queries. Especially if we fast-forward a few years I suspect people are going to be "confiding" a ton in LLMs so the NSA is going to have a lot of useful data to harvest. (This is in general regardless of them hiring an ex-spook BTW; I imagine it's going to be just like what they do with email, phone calls and general web traffic, namely slurping up all the data permanently in their giant datacenters and running all kinds of analysis on it)
3 comments

I think the use case here are LLMs trained on billions of terabytes of bulk surveillance data. Imagine an LLM that has been fed every banking transaction, text message or geolocation ping within a target country. An intelligence analyst can now get the answer to any question very, very quickly.
> I suspect people are going to be "confiding" a ton in LLMs

They won't even need to rely on people using ChatGPT for that if things like Microsoft's "Recall" is rolled out and enabled by default. People who aren't privacy conscious will not disable it or care.

Why do you assume NSA have ChatGPT queries?
Why wouldn’t they, after the Snowden revelations?
Because ChatGPT is a sizable domestic business, and most large data collectors are enrolled in the NSA's PRISM program whether they like it or not.