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NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

nytimes.com

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Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#71

Post by ben_w »

dofm wrote: post #64
HlessClaudesman wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who will make them the next set of weights? If a government can just seize the product of someone else's labour, either they will end up as slave owners or without willing workers.

Serious question: do you think the NSA aren't training their own LLMs? (With or without Anthropic and OpenAI's help) It's a perfect technology for their uses, they get a big chunk of a $100 billion black budget, and they've had access to the research for at least as long as we have.

> Serious question: do you think the NSA aren't training their own LLMs?

Given the evergreen discussion of "are these companies making a profit"*, I think any LLMs that the NSA (or any other government agency worldwide) may be making are quite far from the leading edge.

* Person A: "they are making a loss!" Person B: "Only if you count training, they make a profit on inference, look at what it costs to run comparable open models on generic cloud servers" A: "Sure, but if they don't train new models they'll be left behind, so they're still making a loss"

That and the way compute is now measured in GW, I think even random low budget vloggers just getting started would be able to spot if the NSA was doing anything significant just from the extra heat emissions or power plants getting built.

Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#72

Post by chews »

XMPPwocky wrote: post #44
chews wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> This was their third office space, serving as their headquarters before they outgrew it and eventually relocated to Market Square at 1355 Market Street in 2012. The arab spring twitter uprising was fully a CIA/NSA operation. To be clear, the claim you're making is that because Twitter has their third corporate office in the same building as an AT&T switching center, and US intelligence used a room in AT&T's switchi…

Yes, twitter was used by US 3 letter agencies to assist in the arab spring. To be able to do it in a surreptitious way they were asked to move to that building and get access to all private DMs, and for doing so they got a fat tax break to move to "blighted" market street current location. All of those things fit the timeline and snowden capability disclosures.

The CIA venture arm InQTel invested in Dataminr a company that twitter was also a major shareholder. https://theintercept.com/2016/04/14/in-undisclosed-cia-inves...

Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#73

Post by tempodox »

medlazik wrote: post #29

AI marketing bullshit stunts are unlike anything I've seen in 30 years. It started with MS Copilot so called capabilities for work, which were completely made up use cases that didn't work at all (3 years later still). We've had OpenAI "AGI is coming" and "AI will take your job", now we have Mythos being so "dangerous" for cybersecurity, which of course makes the average Joe interpret it as Anthropic being "the bette…

But the propaganda deluge was a smash hit so far, HN is drowning in “AI” BS, and astroturfers and spin doctors haven’t seen that much business since the cold war. They made more profit than shovel salesmen in the gold rush.

Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#74

Post by rurban »

Onavo wrote: post #35
AustinDev wrote: post #16

They could easily take the weights if they wanted. I don't believe they meaningfully lost access.

If they use the defence production act, would Dario be even able to resign in protest?

John Cook resigned, so Dario might resign also. But he would make it public, so they won't do it

Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#75

Post by scottyah »

thewebguyd wrote: post #51
medlazik wrote: post #29

AI marketing bullshit stunts are unlike anything I've seen in 30 years. It started with MS Copilot so called capabilities for work, which were completely made up use cases that didn't work at all (3 years later still). We've had OpenAI "AGI is coming" and "AI will take your job", now we have Mythos being so "dangerous" for cybersecurity, which of course makes the average Joe interpret it as Anthropic being "the bette…

> and "AI will take your job" Don't forget, its no longer cool to say that now that the public has pushed back. The fact they all changed their tone away from taking jobs tells you that it was all just entirely marketing.

Seems to me that they were mostly right, and the message was received by the right people. No need to ensure it gets distributed to the wrong people.

Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#76

Post by stronglikedan »

dofm wrote: post #64
HlessClaudesman wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who will make them the next set of weights? If a government can just seize the product of someone else's labour, either they will end up as slave owners or without willing workers.

Serious question: do you think the NSA aren't training their own LLMs? (With or without Anthropic and OpenAI's help) It's a perfect technology for their uses, they get a big chunk of a $100 billion black budget, and they've had access to the research for at least as long as we have.

> do you think the NSA aren't training their own LLMs?

They probably already have access to Sentinel, so they wouldn't need to train their own.

Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#78

Post by scottyah »

ToucanLoucan wrote: post #34
medlazik wrote: post #29

AI marketing bullshit stunts are unlike anything I've seen in 30 years. It started with MS Copilot so called capabilities for work, which were completely made up use cases that didn't work at all (3 years later still). We've had OpenAI "AGI is coming" and "AI will take your job", now we have Mythos being so "dangerous" for cybersecurity, which of course makes the average Joe interpret it as Anthropic being "the bette…

All for a product that has yet to make a single honest dollar in profit for anyone who isn't nvidia. When this goes we might well see a recession. Not that anyone responsible will be worse off, of course.

Why on earth would you expect any of them to take profit so early in the game?

Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#79

Post by dofm »

HlessClaudesman wrote: post #66
dofm wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: do you think the NSA aren't training their own LLMs? (With or without Anthropic and OpenAI's help) It's a perfect technology for their uses, they get a big chunk of a $100 billion black budget, and they've had access to the research for at least as long as we have.

I don't think there is much overlap between people capable of building cutting edge LLM's and the people who want to build a cutting edge LLM for the government.

The NSA managed to deliberately insert a backdoor into elliptic-curve cryptography right under the noses of everyone capable of making elliptic-curve cryptography.

I wouldn't count them out.

Re: NSA lost access to Mythos amid Anthropic dispute

#80

Post by ACCount37 »

ben_w wrote: post #71
dofm wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: do you think the NSA aren't training their own LLMs? (With or without Anthropic and OpenAI's help) It's a perfect technology for their uses, they get a big chunk of a $100 billion black budget, and they've had access to the research for at least as long as we have.

> Serious question: do you think the NSA aren't training their own LLMs? Given the evergreen discussion of "are these companies making a profit"*, I think any LLMs that the NSA (or any other government agency worldwide) may be making are quite far from the leading edge. * Person A: "they are making a loss!" Person B: "Only if you count training, they make a profit on inference, look at what it costs to run comparable…

Model training does NOT dominate the model costs.

The rate of inference compute to training compute is ~10:1, for popular frontier models. Models are routinely overtrained past the Chinchilla optimum now because it makes an immense amount of economic sense to do so.

Worse the more niche and unused your models get, but when this "making a loss" fuckery pops up, it's usually about the big guys like Anthropic, OpenAI, GDM and maybe xAI and Meta. Of which only the latter can be accused of not selling enough inference to offset the training runs.

The real money sinks are: R&D and infrastructure buildouts.

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