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by automatic6131 102 days ago
This is pure delusion.

Completely dry of any data, based on vibes and a vague whiff that maybe a chatbot did all the hard work done by hardworking spooks.

Effective operations have happened just like this long before chatgpt launched.

3 comments

Operation Entebbe comes to mind of an insane sounding stunt that worked unreasonably well.
The key line "I’m getting a similar sense for the recent US foreign interventions and wars. They all seem to work slightly better than they should."

There is no measurement of efficacy here. It feels like these things are working better because the US military is now doing big public things, but that is not necessarily a good change over not-doing-big-public-things.

Yeah, that was exactly where he lost me. The US military doesn't need a remarkable amount of luck for these operations to be tactical successes, tactical risk wasn't the reason previous administrations didn't do them. The element that was missing was a complete disregard for second order consequences, and Claude has nothing to do with that whatsoever.
The "article" (I don't know what else to call it; "fantastical screed"?) has also gotten ahead of events a little bit. The operation in Iran doesn't seem like it was planned by a superintelligent AI. It seems as though it was an impulse decision, and poorly thought out at that, with the end result likely to be far worse than its planners anticipated. As for Venezuela, that was literally an inside job, lol.
The hezbollah pagers op, now that was an operation. And I'm willing to bet 99% of the work was done the usual way, many years in the making.
And totally pales when compared to operation spiderweb both in precision and the amount of damage done.
It seems to implicate anything that "work[ed] slightly better than it should" as the work of AI.