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NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

nytimes.com

171–180 of 308 posts

Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has gone all in on AI because it is one of the few things in which they still have an advantage over Asian countries. I wouldn't use the word pathetic but rather "desperation".

So is your position that i.e. the Five Eyes [1] cyber security leaders are just pretending that AI cyber security is a serious thing to play into the geopolitical east vs. west thing and its not genuine? It just feels like people are starting to reach for conspiracy theories rather than engage with the idea that these models might actually be dangerous. [1]. https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5936339-ai-cybersecur…

The “Five Eyes cyber security leaders” aren’t exactly famous for their political independence, or for having the public’s best interests at heart, or erring on the side of regulating less.

You don’t get very far in the spying profession with honesty.

Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NSA is managed by the NSA director, an independently appointed and confirmed office separate from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The DNI does have the authority to restrict funds to the NSA, and sets certain priorities, policy, etc. but the NSA director is not beholden to the DNI and makes their hiring and firing decisions independently. They’re also, currently and historically though not re…

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tim-haugh-firing-trump-60-minut...

Yes, the president can cause chaos in the NSA directly if he chooses (as can the SecDef). The DNI can’t.

Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://blog.encrypt.me/2013/11/05/ssl-added-and-removed-her... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A Yeah, they did (and probably do).

How are they going to MITM communications with certs that never left my machine? Are you suggesting they broke TLS or that they've somehow acquired every private cert generated?

[deleted]

Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#174
post #166

'Mythos “broke into almost all of our classified systems, not in weeks, but in hours.”' Is Mythos a significant danger? The curl experience does not suggest that hysteria is warranted, but this gives me pause.

Or, alternatively, it may suggest that the NSA’s classified systems are not very secure, which seems at least as possible: they may rely on requiring physical access to these systems to even attempt to penetrate them.

Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said absolutely nothing about LLMs, which is a fantastic tool I'm using every day. I'm talking about marketing.

So let’s say you’re in Anthropic’s shoes. You see that LLM’s are getting better and better, and it’s very possible that they will have some impact on jobs in the next few years, and a very meaningful impact on cybersecurity. Is it more ethical to stay silent about these concerns, as you might have a bit of self interest? Or even if it looks a bit self interested, is it better to warn people ahead of time? I think the…

Are we really saying that Anthropic claiming AI would take over industries was some benevolent ethical move rather than marketing their product as a cheap replacement for human labor that works in any industry? Wouldn't the ethical thing, if they were actually concerned about labor displacement, be to shut down the lab and work to disrupt and disable other labs instead?

Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#177
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should seriously reframe this whole AI thing to "SI = simulated intelligence". It's google in a box. Great achievement, makes knowledge work faster, but please stop bothering everyone else. The Uber and Groupon people became billionaires, so the "Simulated Intelligence" folks will also achieve it. No need to worry and drown everyone in these bs stories only non-tech people believe.

Can you describe your experience using modern AI tools that led to this conclusion? It is hard for me to wrap my head around how my perception could be so different from someone else in presumably the same or similar profession. I'm not asking this in bad faith either but I think your getting downvoted because your comment comes off as a pretty strong assertion without giving details on how you got there.

A lot of effort is spent to make the "conversation" feel just like a human-to-human interaction. This is not a naturally occurring phenomenon due to the technology, but rather a feature carefully engineered by those companies in order to get people hooked. Then they have all these tiny nudges like the typing animations or the "thinking..." popups before the next chat message appears.

At some point you might have also noticed the over-use of emojis, the bolted-on jokes, and the tendency to always approve what the user says (even though they have toned that down after backslash). At some point too many people thought they were in a relationship with the chatbot, because it always encouraged and approved them, so they had to hotfix it.

It's a bunch of really dark psychological patterns that are carefully combined by very clever people in order to create the false illusion that the user is experiencing something deeper than an engineered simulation of human interaction.

I think the technology is really useful, but they are obviously not happy with simply replacing a google-like query interface, they want users to fall in love with the product and mentally treat it like a fellow human being - and that's what I think is insincere.

Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NSA has had their own supercomputing program for decades. they design and produce their own large scale machines. chips, fabrics, arithmetic units, all of it. they also employ quite a number of hardcore mathematicians, computer scientists, and systems wranglers. if they decided it was of strategic importance there is absolutely no reason they couldn't train their own models.

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 a…

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.

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