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Anthropic signs a $200M deal with the Department of Defense
41–50 of 108 posts
Re: Anthropic signs a $200M deal with the Department of Defense
#42LLMs are a key enabling technology to extract real insights from the enormous amount of surveillance data the USA captures. I think it's not an understatement to say we are entering a new era here! Previously, the data may have been collected, but there was so much that effectively, on average no one was "looking" at it. Now it can all be looked at.
If you think about LLMs as new types of databases, it's quite obvious that they'll start winning over many types of legacy systems. They ingest unstructured data, they have a natural query language, and they compress the data down into manageable sizes. They might hallucinate, but there are mechanisms for dealing with that. These won't destroy actual systems of record, but they will obsolete quite a lot of ingestion…
arent they complete trash as a database? "Show me people who have googled 'Homemade Bomb' in the last 30 days". For returning bulk data in a sane format it is terrible.
If their job was to process incoming data into a structured form I could see them being useful, but holy cow it will be expensive to in realtime run all the garbage they pick up via surveillance through an AI.
Re: Anthropic signs a $200M deal with the Department of Defense
#43LLMs are a key enabling technology to extract real insights from the enormous amount of surveillance data the USA captures. I think it's not an understatement to say we are entering a new era here! Previously, the data may have been collected, but there was so much that effectively, on average no one was "looking" at it. Now it can all be looked at.
NLP was a thing decades before LLMs and deep learning. If one thing, LLMs are a crazy inefficient and costly way to get at it. I really doubt this has anything to do with scaling.
It is way better now though...
Re: Anthropic signs a $200M deal with the Department of Defense
#44LLMs are a key enabling technology to extract real insights from the enormous amount of surveillance data the USA captures. I think it's not an understatement to say we are entering a new era here! Previously, the data may have been collected, but there was so much that effectively, on average no one was "looking" at it. Now it can all be looked at.
I call it One Fed Per Child...
Re: Anthropic signs a $200M deal with the Department of Defense
#45> With CDAO and other DOD organizations and commands, we'll engage in:
- Working directly with the DOD to identify where frontier AI can deliver the most impact, then developing working prototypes fine-tuned on DOD data
- Collaborating with defense experts to anticipate and mitigate potential adversarial uses of AI, drawing on our advanced risk forecasting capabilities
- Exchanging technical insights, performance data, and operational feedback to accelerate responsible AI adoption across the defense enterprise
>
What exactly is the government getting for $200M? From the above, it sounds like it will be a management consulting style Powerpoint deliverable containing a list of use cases, some best practices and insights, and a plan for doing...something.
Re: Anthropic signs a $200M deal with the Department of Defense
#46Great news! Congrats to Anthropic! I like to see big tech engage with the govt and military.
What changed? 2017 HN would be very different on this take.
Re: Anthropic signs a $200M deal with the Department of Defense
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you really not know? It's a difficult question to answer in an HN thread, because on one hand, it requires a review of the history of empire and war profiteering. But on the other hand, it's just obvious to the point of being difficult to even articulate.
If you live in US, taxes you pay directly fund DoD. So if you sponsor their activities, why can't Anthropic do business with them? Which other company would you rather get their (your) money?
Taxes don't directly pay for military spending. If tax revenue, for whatever reason, dropped off a cliff, they'd continue giving money to the DoD, and just increase debt / money printing to cover the difference.
Re: Anthropic signs a $200M deal with the Department of Defense
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's unethical about selling to DoD?
Anthropic specifically are the people who talk about "model alignment" and "harmful outputs" the most, and whose models are by far the most heavily censored. This is all done on the basis that AI has a great potential to do harm. One would think that this kind of outlook should logically lead to keeping this tech away from applications in which it would be literally making life or death decisions (see also: Israel's…
Why do you think humans would make better life or death decisions? Have we never had innocent civilians killed overseas by US military as a result of human error?
Re: Anthropic signs a $200M deal with the Department of Defense
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you think about LLMs as new types of databases, it's quite obvious that they'll start winning over many types of legacy systems. They ingest unstructured data, they have a natural query language, and they compress the data down into manageable sizes. They might hallucinate, but there are mechanisms for dealing with that. These won't destroy actual systems of record, but they will obsolete quite a lot of ingestion…
arent they complete trash as a database? "Show me people who have googled 'Homemade Bomb' in the last 30 days". For returning bulk data in a sane format it is terrible. If their job was to process incoming data into a structured form I could see them being useful, but holy cow it will be expensive to in realtime run all the garbage they pick up via surveillance through an AI.
Most LLMs I use would respond to this by writing a Python program to run the query.
Re: Anthropic signs a $200M deal with the Department of Defense
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
NLP was a thing decades before LLMs and deep learning. If one thing, LLMs are a crazy inefficient and costly way to get at it. I really doubt this has anything to do with scaling.
It is way better now though...
People pointing out NLP are missing the point — pulling and crafting rules to run effective NLP is time consuming and technical. With an LLM you can just ask it exactly what you want and it interprets. That's the value; and as this deal just proved it's worth the scaling costs.