These systems were ALL originally conceived as surveillance and propaganda tools, with a hitherto-unknown-and-probably-unknowable amount of Cold War Leftover/GWoT black money poured into them to get them scaled before their (sometimes extremely hinky) IPOs. Some of the old security state staff even stayed on. In-Q-Tel. LifeLog. Regina Dugan. Douglas Gage, Jim Breyer, Howard Cox. Thiel and Palantir.
They're not deviating from their mission; they're returning to their Dark Enlightenment roots.
You could say the same about techbro culture as a whole - it comes from the missile men culture of the 1950s-1960s, which was . . . pretty cozy . . with some personalities of the Old European Right. To this day you still hear "well we weren't able to get to orbit without the god-given aid of Glorious Aryan Rocketmen". When the truth is a little more venal, more like the various departments of the armed forces couldn't keep their daggers out of each others' backs. But the seemingly-hippy-ish libertarian culture of the Valley was a veneer on some very dark crap.
ANYWAY. The same technologists have also given us the tools to create true open communications, it's just we haven't been living under the barrel of the gun for long enough yet. I suspect all the tricks will be coming out before too long.
It took me a little while to recover from the name.
I'm not an in-the-know cyber kind of guy, so maybe those guys are like the U.N. of hackers. But it's really hard to think about this story without at least cracking a smile. Seriously, you try it. Pretend you are a news anchor on the 6 o'clock national news, if such a thing still existed. Try saying the first bullet in a news voice and try not to bust out laughing.
Been waiting a long time for CSS inherit() . . . although I freely admit that (and CSS Functions) open a respectable-sized can of worms. Sort of like what transclusion and conditionals do for document markup.
Anchor Positioning would be sweet and doesn't feel like it's got so much baggage.
A theoretical scenario: I am a company in the united states making missile seekers.
My software guys say, hey, the imaging infrared seeker is like a zillion percent harder to fool if it has this tiny LLM brain that we blow into the chip. They grab the most optimized model, which so happens to come from a PRC lab. Sure, it's running on all US hardware but, deep down in its little LLM brain, it so happens to be virtually blind to any IR signature that has a pulsed frequency of XXX.
Now all my missiles have what is basically an externally controlled IFF in their little missile brains. "Chinese jet? I see no Chinese jet."
Or what if the pulse contained more instructions? Like, say, "Do a U-Turn and Lock On The Closest Jet Motor You See". A couple of PLAAF pilots watching USN aviators frantically trying to dodge their own missiles - what might possibly be the most embarrassing air-to-air engagement in aviation history.
These models are called nondeterministic for a reason, and it's because the massively complex interrelated weights are incredibly hard to pick apart and audit. It's not like OSS code from a deterministic software program, like a pypi dependency. Now, it's not impossible, and THAT is where the weight of regulation and such SHOULD be going, but, hey, not sure you noticed, US Leadership is not exactly sitting in a surfeit of technical expertise at the moment.
I don't think it's the right call, to blanket ban them, but it's understandable.
That would have to be a stuxnet-level targeted sting operation, with a general purpose LLM exhibiting some ridiculously specific behavior in ridiculously specific circumstances, in such a way that nobody catches it in testing (and none of the other zillions of users of that general purpose LLM notices anything odd). If you're so paranoid that you do a blanket ban rather than just saying "hey guys maybe double check before using Chinese software in weapons we plan on maybe pointing at the Chinese", frankly LLMs should be the least of your worries, supply chain wise. Every US government employee uses a phone made in China (because they all are), and the president doesn't even update his, so color me skeptical that this has anything to do with security posture.
Now you know how much testing happens in defense systems. Or, more accurately, the quality of the testing regime, in defense systems.
That said, totally agree. There's no way this was fueled from actual concern. They're just nervous about the needles drifting next to the bubbles full of money.
This is also the word inside Defense sector contractors as well. No PRC origin anything - no code, OSS or no, no open weight models, no assistance from them.
No regs set in stone yet, but DoD doesn't need regs - they can tell you what the rule is and that's that.
Are you me? My old motorbike injuries are a little more distributed but -- like yours -- almost entirely crippling from the perspective of doing anything joyful; we're in the same bucket yearwise; and it sounds like we always visit the doctor with just the one bullet in the chamber.
Mostly just posting to say, hey, there's others out here like you. Hang in there, Almost-Me. If not, see you on the other side.
All of these model-based approaches are fundamentally nondeterministic systems, and there's no escaping the math of their fundamentals, which is textual representation of natural language.
The "nondeterministic" part is enough to flag these tools in some industries. We can't risk having a different answer to the same question in some applications. Even if the differences are small, differences compound over time, as anyone who's worked in inertial guidance can tell you.
Aside from the "nondeterministic" part, that "Fundamental Math of LLMs" is a very different beast from math that runs much of the rest of the cosmos. It's just human language. Just because you can talk about something does not mean you understand it.
Existing "LLM-type" technology performs beyond all prior preconception because there's pretty obviously some kind of basal mathematical relationship between different kinds of meaning. But that relationship, no one's really grappled with it formally in its entirety. It's probably adjacent to the big new science/mathematics of Emergence. It's also, from a pure science aspect, probably the most interesting aspect of these systems. All the crap we've been trying to wrench - for DECADES - with taxonomies, semantics, a swirling universe of computational linguistics in all its variety - that crap could conceivably have a single " $ E = mc^ 2" moment. But we don't fundamentally understand it, and it's a real mistake to hand critical systems to models that aren't understood. Down that path alchemy lies.
Such oligarchs will be receiving some harsh and unforgettable lessons after the final collapse of the Western system, assuming Chinese dominance post collapse. I don't think the PRC will see those "investments" as courting promise of . . much of anything, actually. Except possibly to mark you as a troublemaker.
Even without considering PRC in the picture, in a hands-on-throat and teeth-in-veins North American breakdown, the Maddened Godspeakers will overwhelm the Bioshock Cosplay. They have the numbers - virtually everyone outside of a CONUS urban center - and they're much, much, much more energetic when it comes to their finely-tuned plans for the world.
China has recently gone thru a spat of executing a slew of billionaires that got too independent minded, and privatized all golf courses in the country. They are speaking loudly to one man, and he can't even understand what is being screamed.
Good reason for Americans to put some intellectual prowess behind fixing the mess and spinning up a new virtuous cycle.
Even if you're not a native speaker it's worth watching the subbed versions versus the dubbed, mostly because the US distributors (cough Disney cough) demanded thematic motif music stuffed in every single goddamn semi-contemplative break in the action.
The subbed original audio features absolutely top class environmental sound design, and a more sparse musical landscape, when it is even present.
That's not to disparage the US scoring, which is fantastic, but the presence of music in scenes- versus the sound of distant fighting, the chittering winds, roaring water- changes them quite utterly.
I agree with the sentiment. The problem I have here is not "inappropriate content" per se but what the gesture is intended to communicate to the nation: get accustomed to public displays of the state's monopoly on violence.
SecDef has said that the public should watch this execution, by the way, not that they can. That is a very specific and deliberate thing they're communicating.
I got the same willies from watching the old (arguably propaganda) show COPS, but to a vastly lesser extent. COPS had other stuff happening besides people being shot in the face.
Now, if you're of the ideological view that a nation's population should be pre-brutalized to prepare them for state violence, then this action makes all the sense in the world. I would humbly remind people of this opinion, however, that state-proposed programs like this never end well. The population inevitably points their newly recalibrated moral compass at the closest target available: their neighbors. We pre-brutalize soldiers before we drop them in with enemy, but pre-brutalizing doctors, cops, teachers . . . is almost unfailingly unwise in a national context. Very good at breaking a nation though.
They're not deviating from their mission; they're returning to their Dark Enlightenment roots.
You could say the same about techbro culture as a whole - it comes from the missile men culture of the 1950s-1960s, which was . . . pretty cozy . . with some personalities of the Old European Right. To this day you still hear "well we weren't able to get to orbit without the god-given aid of Glorious Aryan Rocketmen". When the truth is a little more venal, more like the various departments of the armed forces couldn't keep their daggers out of each others' backs. But the seemingly-hippy-ish libertarian culture of the Valley was a veneer on some very dark crap.
ANYWAY. The same technologists have also given us the tools to create true open communications, it's just we haven't been living under the barrel of the gun for long enough yet. I suspect all the tricks will be coming out before too long.
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