Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Anthropic: Expanding Access to Claude for Government

anthropic.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 99 posts

Re: Anthropic: Expanding Access to Claude for Government

#31

Post by thomashop »

AlotOfReading wrote: post #25
alach11 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use LLMs extensively in my field to automate all sorts of tasks. Need to classify a million PDF documents for cheap? Write a prompt and submit a batch job. Need to read 30,000 drilling reports to automatically scan for hazards? Done in 60 minutes. These are tasks that would have taken months of development or millions of dollars in manual effort before. It's not just hype.

One thing I've struggled with while applying LLMs to business problems is how others have dealt with identifying and managing system failures. Let's say some of your drilling reports contain a pattern that indicates balrog activity, which the LLM misses. The legal or insurance context requires you to monitor and address potential balrog activity. How do you plan for these failures? In almost every case I've seen, the…

Same way you manage human failures?

Re: Anthropic: Expanding Access to Claude for Government

#32

Post by andrepd »

space_fountain wrote: post #19
ryanackley wrote: post #10

I find all of the virtue signalling from AI companies exhausting.

It's interesting how we dismiss anyone caring about things other than profit as virtue signally. Anthropic was founded by people who seemed to legitimately care about AI safety. It's possible the current conglomeration that is the company doesn't, but I wouldn't be so quick to assume that.

It's possible that they have the best intentions but are woefully misguided, like pretty much the average sv techno-optimist.

Re: Anthropic: Expanding Access to Claude for Government

#33

Post by Jerrrrry »

baq wrote: post #21
alach11 wrote: post #3

There's no doubt that LLMs massively expand the ability of agencies like the NSA to perform large-scale surveillance at a higher quality. I wonder if Anthropic (or other LLM providers) ever push back or restrict these kinds of use cases? Or is that too risky for them?

NSA should be training their own GPT-4 or better model as we speak and should have been doing it for a long while now. Anything else is borderline incompetence.

[dead]

Re: Anthropic: Expanding Access to Claude for Government

#34

Post by thomashop »

ablation wrote: post #16
alach11 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use LLMs extensively in my field to automate all sorts of tasks. Need to classify a million PDF documents for cheap? Write a prompt and submit a batch job. Need to read 30,000 drilling reports to automatically scan for hazards? Done in 60 minutes. These are tasks that would have taken months of development or millions of dollars in manual effort before. It's not just hype.

A genuine question and not meant as a snipe: as hallucinations are an inherent “feature” of LLMs, how can you be sure of the accuracy of the model’s interpretation of those 30,000 drilling report hazards? Or what is the acceptable level of risk?

How can you be sure with humans doing the work?

Re: Anthropic: Expanding Access to Claude for Government

#35

Post by thomashop »

criddell wrote: post #20
alach11 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use LLMs extensively in my field to automate all sorts of tasks. Need to classify a million PDF documents for cheap? Write a prompt and submit a batch job. Need to read 30,000 drilling reports to automatically scan for hazards? Done in 60 minutes. These are tasks that would have taken months of development or millions of dollars in manual effort before. It's not just hype.

Would you trust your LLM to file your taxes for you?

Yes because without an LLM I don't do it.

Re: Anthropic: Expanding Access to Claude for Government

#36

Post by goatlover »

bongodongobob wrote: post #27
JBorrow wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boy, I can’t wait for the foundation of my house to disappear because the LLM mis-classified a drilling report as non-hazardous. What’s the deal here with liability and accountability? That’s a serious problem when considering using these for anything other than toy problems.

You don't actually think the LLM is reviewing those 30k documents do you? You tell it to write a program (which is easy to audit) to pull the info from the PDFs or whatever. I don't get why this crowd is so goddamn unimaginative with LLMs.

Because I've heard of enough lazy uses of LLMs to be suspicious. Auditing the program means being sure that the info pulled from those documents is reviewed properly. Also, a complete lack of regard for other people's privacy.

Re: Anthropic: Expanding Access to Claude for Government

#37

Post by CuriouslyC »

jsheard wrote: post #12
nuz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're pretty clear about being pro safety to the extreme, and mass surveillance to protect american interests and abuse of LLM tech (e.g. open source misuses) are probably within the umbrella of ends justifying the means logic anthropic employs.

When you see the kinds of things that are developed in the name of "defense" it's easy to see how AI "safety" could become a similar sort of doublespeak.

AI safety already is double speak. The primary meaning is "safety" for investors who don't want to be associated with something distasteful. The other meaning is basically a thin cover.

Re: Anthropic: Expanding Access to Claude for Government

#39

Post by energy123 »

sobellian wrote: post #30
bongodongobob wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have it write a program to analyze it. I think a lot of people fail to understand that you don't always need the LLM to do the thing, have it write a program to do the thing for you.

Okay, but you still need to debug the program. If your program must give correct results you still need to check the program output against every case. There's no free lunch there.

Speaking generally: The program doesn't always have to give correct results. The program just needs to reduce 30k documents down to 200 documents for human review.

You're comparing LLMs to a hypothetical alternative where a human reviews all 30k documents in detail. But the real alternative is often just a worse quality sieve where more errors blunder their way through the existing flawed processes. LLMs can improve on that.

Re: Anthropic: Expanding Access to Claude for Government

#40

Post by noodlesUK »

I can imagine that for many government tasks, there would be a need for a reduced-censorship version of the AI model. It's pretty easy running into the guardrails on ChatGPT and friends when you talk about violence or other spicy topics.

This then begs the question of what level of censorship reduction to apply. Should government employees be allowed to e.g., war-game a mass murder with an AI? What about discussing how to erode civil rights?

Post reply on HN