301–310 of 509 posts
Everyone is jumping to conclusions. The DoD is huge and does a lot of boring things. There is a very good chance this won’t be useful for anything physical weapon related, especially when you consider their offerings.
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No, we just have a different perspective. USA is the bully, not the rest of the world. Any country that grows powerful enough to get in the eye of the USA needs a strong military, because the USA has a military and a record of interventionism that can't be ignored.
> No, we just have a different perspective. USA is the bully, not the rest of the world. There is no question that the US has acted like a bully in Southern America, but you ignore that other countries have acted the same way in other parts of the world[1], and with far more disastrous results[2]. If you want to dig into records, then the ground under my feet has seen a Russian invasion roughly every 50 years for as…
No. The argument is not that having some other country as hegemon would be better than the US. The argument is that any single country being overly powerful is a negative, and a more multipolar would would be healthier.
"The US should maintain enough military capacity to prevent/repel an invasion of the continental US" is not particularly controversial. But the US "defending" countries halfway around the world is not healthy for either.
> Pax Americana is currently the only thing preventing me and hundreds of millions of other Europeans from sharing the same fate. Russians do not dare to invade as long as they don't know if Americans would press the nuclear button or not. My freedom to live in peace and unharmed, speak my language and practice my culture, directly depends on the missile silos tucked away somewhere between the cornfields of Iowa. How about that for a perspective?
Russia has spent the past year failing to conquer a country of 40 million, without any involvement from those missile silos. If they tried to invade Poland or Finland they would crumble even quicker. The only countries with a legitimate fear of a Russian invasion are the same countries who have shown zero willingness to protect other people's "freedom to speak their language and practice their culture" when it comes to Russian people living within their (present) borders.
I'm confused - what exactly does the Pentagon have to gain from OpenAI's products? Their front-runners are an LLM and an image generator, and I'm not sure what large-scale use case the US Department of Defense can have for either of these.
I'm confused - what exactly does the Pentagon have to gain from OpenAI's products? Their front-runners are an LLM and an image generator, and I'm not sure what large-scale use case the US Department of Defense can have for either of these.
But it seems that the military these days is enamored by the attention that the silicon valley tech world has gotten over the last couple decades. And its true that the military can be ridiculously inefficient and could use more ‘lean startup’ in its procurement process. But I don’t think they’ve seen enough hype cycles to be able to filter useful tech from hype/hysteria.
For example, I recently saw a senior Army officer talk about the need to incorporate AI decision making tools for senior leaders. Which seems to me to be the absolute last thing you’d want. A technology that needs large training data sets is diametrically opposed to the military profession where the classic mistake is to be ‘fighting the last war’ instead of the current situation. Not only are there differences from conflict to conflict and situation to situation, but you’re going up against a human opponent whose lives literally depend on doing the opposite of what you expect and is continually evolving.
Another example I think would be the Army building out its Cyber Command while being caught completely flat footed with electronic warfare (jamming, spoofing, etc.) Having an adversary hack into your network is a huge concern for a corporation or against foreign espionage. But ignores the fact that TCP/IP ports and zero days matter a lot less when someone switches on a 10kW jammer, cuts a fiber optic cable, or takes out the power staion and generator you were relying on. Put another way, the upper layers of the ol’ network stack aren’t worth a lot if you can yank the physical layer away.
So regarding AI, I’m sure there are useful applications but I’m doubting much of the use of the term in a military context. Drones and drone warfare? Sure. But that may or may not require anything that should really be called AI.
I'm confused - what exactly does the Pentagon have to gain from OpenAI's products? Their front-runners are an LLM and an image generator, and I'm not sure what large-scale use case the US Department of Defense can have for either of these.
The military thinks they can predict the outcome of battles using tech. They already do extensive sim-gaming stuff for such, and an LLM would fit into these things nicely enough. Whether it actually adds meaningful value matters much less than whether the people paying for it think it can be made to add meaningful value. The other obvious purpose is propaganda, foreign and domestic.
Ugh. Do they really? Ok, I’m more concerned now.
I’m curious where I can find more about the sim-gaming you mentioned. I know there are all kinds of simulators for training as well as wargaming but wasn’t aware of stuff used for modelling outcomes. Then again, I don’t have any involvement with that stuff professionally.
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Ok? What's so bad about speaking Russian? English isn't my first language, I have no attachment to it. If Russian had become the lingua franca of the world I'd have learned that instead.
> What's so bad about speaking Russian? Forcing Russian language and culture upon conquered nations was and remains one of the main methods of extermination of conquered peoples. There's even a word for it, Russification . Your question is the same as asking what was so bad about "speaking English" in the context of American native population and European settlers. Most of modern-day Russia is a land conquered from n…
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Let's just hope it doesn't turn into the Horizon- or Terminator-type of AI powered drones.
This is feeling somewhat inevitable. There are a nonzero number of highly-intelligent individuals capable of developing weapons tech AND AI/ML who are also 100% Dead Certain nothing could go wrong because they're super clever and would never fuck up and create skynet. ... I don't think it'll be a skynet situation, though. Less global domination and more "Someone activated the autonomous systems and [lost control, had…
Everyone is jumping to conclusions. The DoD is huge and does a lot of boring things. There is a very good chance this won’t be useful for anything physical weapon related, especially when you consider their offerings.
They will use it to supplement their troll factions with robots and cyborgs. For their war on truth
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At least Ilya's crew was working on alignment ( https://openai.com/blog/introducing-superalignment ). If only the rank-and-file had been more vocally supportive of that, instead of enthusiastically boarding the Altman train. Look where that train is headed...
Alignment with whose values? Altmans? Ilya's? Humanity's? The USA? Some unspecified ideal? I have a really hard time passing the responsibility for such massive impact decisions to a bunch of talented technicians who have already demonstrated a poor command of ethics. The more likely outcome is that it will end up being 'alignment with whoever has the money', and that's a recipe for some bad stuff in our future.
Queue the immortal soldiers?