[distill17801]

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.

[convolvatron]

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.