This seems very much the beginning of the situation predicted by Aschenbrenner in [1], where the AI labs eventually will be fully part of the national security apparatus. Fascinating to see if the other major AI labs also add ex-military folks to their directors or whether this is unique to OpenAI.
Or conceivably his experience is genuinely relevant and unrelated to US national security going forward, completely unrelated to the governmental apparatus and not a sign of the times.
At least 12 exabytes of mostly encrypted data, waiting for the day that the NSA can decrypt it and unleash all of these tools on it.
Whenever that day happens (or happened) it will represent a massive shift in global power. It is on par with the Manhattan project in terms of scope and consequences.
Soon if not already they can just ask questions about people now.
"Has this person ever done anything illegal?"
Then the tools comb through a lifetime of communications intercepts looking for that answer.
It's like the ultimate dirt finder, but without the outsized manual human effort required to ensure that it's largely only abused against people of prominence.
It's less about the NSA having AI capabilities and more the inverse - the NSA having access to people's chatGPT queries. Especially if we fast-forward a few years I suspect people are going to be "confiding" a ton in LLMs so the NSA is going to have a lot of useful data to harvest. (This is in general regardless of them hiring an ex-spook BTW; I imagine it's going to be just like what they do with email, phone calls and general web traffic, namely slurping up all the data permanently in their giant datacenters and running all kinds of analysis on it)
I think the use case here are LLMs trained on billions of terabytes of bulk surveillance data. Imagine an LLM that has been fed every banking transaction, text message or geolocation ping within a target country. An intelligence analyst can now get the answer to any question very, very quickly.
> I suspect people are going to be "confiding" a ton in LLMs
They won't even need to rely on people using ChatGPT for that if things like Microsoft's "Recall" is rolled out and enabled by default. People who aren't privacy conscious will not disable it or care.
Probably, but so did a lot of people. Computer vision and classifier/discriminator models were pretty common in the 2000s and extremely feasible with consumer hardware in the 2010s.
Its unsafe, and there are warning signs everywhere warning you to supervise the fuelling and not leave it unattended. You could walk away from a fuelling car... but the failure mode of burning down the whole gas station is so severe it seems a poor idea.
>* How one retires at 25 when working at Google which is way past IPO and the 100x return on stock option which is only possible at the earliest stage?
levels.fyi reports a L4 averages $270k/yr at Google. Can sock away a whole lot of that pretty fast.
$270k in the Bay Area is not retirement at 25 money unless you’re that Googler living in a van in the parking lot, or your retirement plan is living simply in a poor country. It’s a fine living, to be clear, but in a high cost of living area you’re paying high rent until you can buy an expensive house, etc. and the American healthcare system alone means you need to have millions saved as a buffer against illness over that kind of timeframe (kinda hard to re-enter the workforce at 40 with cancer when you realize your cost projections were optimistic).
>It’s a fine living, to be clear, but in a high cost of living area you’re paying high rent until you can buy an expensive house, etc.
You don't need to live in a high cost of living area, except if you're competing American Psycho style.
You could live where the other 95% of people working in the Bay Area live.
I'm pretty sure that the baristas serving those Googlers in cafes outside the Googleplex don't make $270K a year, and still get to work in the same area.
If that means more commuting, that's always an option. People commute 1-2 hours per direction too, to make $50K, I'm pretty sure a 20-something making $270K can handle it.
Heck, even a daily two-way Uber would be totally doable, and other expenses added, they'd still get to save over $150K per year still.
You can't make a problem in one place, and do some good elsewhere and then call it even. Thats not how being responsible works. Dont sugar coat the man and his nonsense with a scant act of charity.
That really feels like the emptiest of promises. "Oh, I'm going to give away all my money once I'm done living my life of impossible excess". They don't get points for that. They could give away a massive portion of it RIGHT NOW and be able to live in the exact same excess, but they won't. I won't give them credit for future promises that cost them nothing to make.
This kind of thing just reeks of shortsightedness.
Having one lucky prick who sure maybe worked a little hard maybe not decide what to do for humanity with his money that he won through predatory means is dumb. Garbage in garbage out, anyone who is focused on mind fucking the worlds population in order to get a little richer is not going to give away anything in an effective manner.
When we stop having zuckerbergs, gates buffets and so on we probably will see improvement.
More realistically (because 100% seems like a big ask), he could give away 99% of it right now and he'd still have enough for himself and his descendants to never have to work again.
Tomatoe flavors are (in addition to variety) extremely sensitive to nutrients and growing condition. I've had Barrys Crazy Cherry be one of the best flavors ever one year, rich and lowacid and textured and sweet, and absolute watery cardboard the next year - from the same seed batch on a semipro scale.
Very cool! Have definitely thought about this for mine, have never actually gotten past looking around and seeing nobody makes them yet. It'd be amazing to throw some bluetooth on there and be able to flash different patterns, or to throw a fullblown mini screen on it...
I wonder how hard it would be to make a set of large-gauge lobe jewelry with a screen in it. Perhaps 1/2" or 3/4" would be doable?
A thought re sales and sizing, though: industrials are usually sold in quarter-inch increments and most people buy 1-2.5" from what I understand, so it should be doable to make them to sell.
A screen requires a loooot more grunt than this microprocessor, not to mention a lot more battery power and supporting components.
At best you could probably do a small low-res (8x8?) LED matrix with some programmed patterns but even that would require more batteries etc than this and get exponentially heavier.
Or conceivably his experience is genuinely relevant and unrelated to US national security going forward, completely unrelated to the governmental apparatus and not a sign of the times.
[1] situational-awareness.ai