Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by bpodgursky 432 days ago
There is not a secret super duper powerful military version of cutting edge consumer technologies. AI is catching everyone with their pants down. You have access to the most powerful computer intelligence on earth, the same ones the NSA and CIA have access to. It's a bizarre world.
3 comments
viraptor 432 days ago
It's not about a secret super duper version, just specialisation. If military needs a product for location finding they can train that to a much better quality in a much smaller space than chatgpt, which needs to do just about anything. You can spend 100% energy on the task you want instead of memorising the bible.

Medical industry does it. Coding autocomplete solutions do it. Large deployments of support agents do it. Etc.

> most powerful computer intelligence on earth

There's more than one dimension. Chatgpt is way worse at classifying my data than my custom 30k weight model. (And around infinity times more expensive) Which is more powerful? Yeah...

link
abletonlive 432 days ago
If you're going to make such an assertive statement you should maybe backup that claim with some substance. Without such, it's akin to an atheist proudly proclaiming there is definitely no such thing as god.
link
bpodgursky 432 days ago
No, actually the person asserting that a thing exists has the burden of proof.

You can demonstrate that the military has fighter jets better than civilians. Easy. You have no evidence at all that the military has super advanced AI systems consumers don't have. And in fact all anecdotal evidence for the past 3 years is that OSINT is as good or better than the DoD capabilities for photo analysis.

link
abletonlive 432 days ago
> No, actually the person asserting that a thing exists has the burden of proof.

Well, I'm not the one that made an assertion so I think both of you should provide some proof/evidence/support for your assertion. It doesn't matter if the assertion is for the existence of something or not. When you make an assertion you provide backing evidence to support it. Even for the assertion of nonexistence. This is basic stuff. Weird to even have to argue about it on HN. But just in case you never learned it, "There is no X" (your original assertion) is different from "There is no evidence for the existence of X".

> Easy. You have no evidence at all that the military has super advanced AI systems consumers don't have.

Okay I'll bite, we have access to project maven and knows exactly what it's capable of?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Maven https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2024-ai-warfare-project-m...

Okay sure, whatever you say. You clearly are privy to all of the projects the government is involved with, and surely while all of the consumer AI capabilities have been released they've been sitting around doing nothing with it like a deer in headlights.

Consumer AI has more data available to train off of than the government....right?

I'm sure the government just threw away all their AI projects and bought a chatgpt pro subscription because it's better or the same as what they are using with all the same capabilities...

What a silly position to take. Why did everybody foolishly make such a big deal about all the data they were collecting all these years

link
neom 432 days ago
That's kinda not how it works around here tho, I think? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - we generally don't cross examine, and generally take people at their word, debate the merits sure, but it's not particularly done around here to say "prove it", at least from what I can tell.
link
wruza 432 days ago
it's akin to an atheist proudly proclaiming there is definitely no such thing as god

Almost feels like you supposed that to sound bad.

link
abletonlive 432 days ago
Yes because agnostic atheism is a logically superior belief system, that's much more intellectually honest and ironically: humble.
link
wruza 431 days ago
Aren't beliefs secondary guests in discussions about substance?

Edit: I'm not even a strict atheist if that matters much, but I wouldn't talk about it in assertive/provemewrong tone anywhere, cause it's not even remotely logical.

link
namaria 431 days ago
Atheism is such a weird position to take. Why define a negation of something you don't believe to be real? I'm not "a-lochnes-monster-ist" or "ayettist". If someone thinks the idea of a deity is nonsensical why then use the label "atheist"?
link
hhh 432 days ago
We don’t have access to huge swaths of satellite imagery being collected to be able to create a specialized model.

A few companies do. It’s still expensive to get recent imagery.

link