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Anthropic: Expanding Access to Claude for Government

anthropic.com

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Re: Anthropic: Expanding Access to Claude for Government

#3

Post by alach11 »

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?

Re: Anthropic: Expanding Access to Claude for Government

#4

Post by wkat4242 »

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?

Will it really though? So far I've seen most of the "revolutionise" claims to be mainly hot air and marketing.

It's possible that LLMs will suddenly make a leap in reliability and usability (e.g. much higher context window without corresponding massive increases in memory usage). But I have yet to see it.

So far it's great at some specific usecases. Interacting with humans, rewriting or making up text. Summarising. A hit & miss at everything else.

Don't get me wrong, I love AI tech and I'm heavily experimenting with it (both at work and at home with local models). But as with most hyped technologies I find the benefits far overblown in marketing stories.

Our leadership jumped on Microsoft Copilot (the one for Office 365 because they have tens of different copilots :) ) like a pack of hungry wolves afraid to miss the boat. And the result was.... kinda meh. It's kinda promising and impresses with simple play school stuff ("make me a presentation about home safety") and totally and utterly fails when you try to do anything serious work related. Sooo many times I get "Sorry I can't do this right now", "Sorry I need more training for this", "I can't do this for you but this is how you can do it yourself!" or it does something but like totally wrong.

Meanwhile we have a bunch of MS training people running around evangelising and telling us how great everything is and making excuses for everything that goes wrong :) You can almost see them breathe a sigh of relief every time something works as it should. That's not what we were promised.

Maybe it will get there, but I don't see it happening tomorrow to be honest. LLMs were an impressive leap but their achilles heels have become clear and it's proving difficult to overcome them.

I'm really enjoying surfing the knife's edge of technology (as I was and still am with metaverse) but I don't yet see this as a game changer except in a few specific industries. People editing text for a living certainly have a need to worry.

I also wonder what will happen with future AI training. Now that more and more websites are filled with AI-generated content that is often at best "mediocre", and considering future AI models will be trained on that, will they be able to improve their accuracy or struggle to maintain it?

Re: Anthropic: Expanding Access to Claude for Government

#6

Post by nuz »

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?

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.

Re: Anthropic: Expanding Access to Claude for Government

#7

Post by nameless101 »

So, basically all "confidential" information, if you are a subject "of interest", will be in the cloud and used to train models that can spit it out again. And the models will confabulate stories about you.

The can call themselves "sonnet", "bard", "open" and a whole plethora of other positive things. What remains is that they go into the direction of Palantir and the rest is just marketing.

Re: Anthropic: Expanding Access to Claude for Government

#8

Post by dinglestepup »

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?

That ship has probably sailed. If Llama3 is performing on par with GPT-3.5, then there is no real benefit for companies to restrict access to slightly better proprietary models.

Re: Anthropic: Expanding Access to Claude for Government

#9

Post by alach11 »

wkat4242 wrote: post #4
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?

Will it really though? So far I've seen most of the "revolutionise" claims to be mainly hot air and marketing. It's possible that LLMs will suddenly make a leap in reliability and usability (e.g. much higher context window without corresponding massive increases in memory usage). But I have yet to see it. So far it's great at some specific usecases. Interacting with humans, rewriting or making up text. Summarising. A…

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.

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