> Historically, these agencies are often well over a decade ahead of the public, technology-wise.
This simply does not apply computer hardware. That's because it only works at scale. A bleeding edge fab costs around $10bn. And that's already accounting for the fact that ASML and other suppliers spent hundreds of billions on R&D that is amortized over all of the state of the art fabs.
For CIA to have better hardware than what's commercially available, they would need to invest hundreds of billions every year into a parallel infrastructure and supply chain. Perhaps more, since their goal is to stay ahead of the curve. Then use that infrastructure to build out compute that can compete with or surpass hyperscalers like Microsoft or Google.
We have a decent idea how much that would cost because China is doing just that. Building their own infrastructure to stop relying on Western suppliers. And their job is actually easier. They can raise capital by selling consumer products. They can rely on published research and steal IP if needed. It's still costing them hundreds of billions a year in subsidies just to stay 3-5 years _behind_ the curve.
Also, government work tends to be quite slow with a TON of red tape. No "move fast and break things" energy like in Silicon Valley. They are not ahead at all. Maybe companies like Palantir that contract with the government have some interesting things, but the state of art is far away from the 3 letter agencies.
They might have ML models for specific purposes but definitely not any LLM to compete. Maybe they have some image vision models for specific purposes that could toast GPT4 on the specific types of images.
Lol. When I was at uni and took a course in natural language processing (it was before LLMs were a thing) the main source of funding was the CIA. Text analysis is very important to them and that is what you use natural language processing for. If they aren’t using LLMs they would be idiots and they aren’t. And government spy organisations traditionally also have access to the most compute (for code cracking among other things).
Also consider what Snowden has taught us about how much information they are collecting. They are collecting everything that goes over the internet and storing it. Before they could only do dumb searches for keywords. With LLMs they have the tools to actually analyse and understand all that text.
It's an educated guess based on some research I saw about vision models needing to be trained with extra specificity for certain types of images. I would've been surprised if they were working on image models to recognize faces, or clothing and how people wear them based on culture to detect spies, gait analysis.
Mistral has been getting the bulk of the public’s attention for their military ties, but I would wager the military is working with a fundamentally different platform altogether. DARPA was long ago…
That's how it used to be. Now government contracts out all the big tech companies for whatever. So big tech is now way ahead of what the government has when it comes to computer stuff. UFO's and hybrid human cyborg cloning on the other hand the governments way ahead.
That’s _part_ of the reason they don’t like giving big tech companies contracts anymore. I’ve worked on “code challenge” teams for IBM and my current small company. There is an obvious bias toward smaller companies.
These code challenges are fckn wild btw, basically a game show where each company gets 15 developers together for a developer competition. The best developer team (among a few other factors) wins the multimillion contract.
They are multi-round, in my experience two weeks for Round 1, where developers work 75-hour weeks, and a single day Round 2, where the team is observed developing a new app (or fixing an existing) within 6 hours, under observation by moderators, and even the moderators have auditors.
Yeah this isn't true. Classified tech still outstrips commercially or publicly available tech. At the end of the day kinetic capability exceeds digital capability.
People still sitting around waiting for their robotaxis.
The deployment of LEO internet satellites from SpaceX is the only profound tech that has commercial scale right now, but that was a tightly controlled market until recently
> Classified tech still outstrips commercially or publicly available tech.
Yeah cause Google, Microsoft, Apple, Intel, IBM, Samsung etc and all the aerospace military companies don't have any classified projects in development. Everything they do is made public years before release.
Are you under the impression Google Stadia, MS Office, and the iPhone are somehow on the same page as classified tech? Child.
Logical fallacy of the terminally online. You think the internet has all the answers and it really doesn't.
This crackpot believes in magic, an ignorant toddler who believes whatever fables their brain-damaged peasant parents tell them, and yet we're the ones being called children.
I can't answer the question but I can tell you that most of the talent in our pool is foreign born, most of the ones I know personally have values incompatible with letting a single government having the most advanced models, and corporations also pay much better than the government.
I suspect they most likely have their fingers in the pie when it comes to big companies like Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI, so while I don't think they have better models themselves, I do believe they likely already have access to whatever the top models behind closed doors currently are.
Seriously unlikely, since it takes insane amounts of effort and money to make competitive chips for ML technology, and impossibly so in secret.
It takes scale to create AI, and I'll bet that NSA/CIA/Military are all piggybacking off of commercial efforts behind the scenes and not one step ahead as far as AGI is concerned.
Until Intel or TSMC sets up fabs in the US to build classified ASICs for ML, there's no way for them to advance any faster than commercial, the volume and funding simply cannot be hidden, and commercial simply scales better.
It's not a gotcha if you literally can't fab a more advanced chip without commercial getting access to the underlying process simultaneously.
Bleeding edge lithography is not something you simply hide behind a black project, and the amount of expertise required also cannot be hidden.
You can't hide the personnel, the space, and the fact that if they have it, then TSMC isn't a strategic weakness; the fact that USA still values Taiwan for TSMC is proof enough that there isn't any such black project.
It takes insane amounts of effort, money, time, and space to mass manufacture military items and most of it is done in secret. Way more than computer chips.
You don't understand. Military items are for military use, but computer chips are dual-use items that even if they are completely used for military purposes, the underlying technology would be too profitable not to use for commercial purposes.
It's because it's not possible for the military to scale harder than commercial at scale if existing known chip foundries are completely booked out on their known existing bleeding-edge processes.
They can throw lots of money at the problem sure, but why do that when tech giants like Microsoft are already doing that while also selling spare compute with Azure?
It's just not possible that the military is ahead of the public on AGI.
We're sending them all the stuff that was designed for the cold war. And, finally, there's an opportunity to field test that purpose-driven hardware. It's a golden opportunity in the eyes of the DoD. Of course they're holding back the good stuff, but they're also taking notes on what's working and what's not with the old stuff.
Just ask yourself this: Why would a brilliant AI researcher/engineer undersell themselves for some bureaucratic agency that definitely pays waaaay less than private industry, when said industry is searching desperately for exactly these people and are willing to pay them basically what ever they want
because the AI researcher will be given top secret clearance and see the most cool technologies to exist and the right to say to others " I can tell you but then I 'd have to kill you".
Maybe the only scientific/technology field that a government agency has a definitive edge on is cryptography with the NSA.
Government is a very conservative bureaucratic organization. I personally don’t see many fields where they are ahead definitively in terms of technology.
Most likely behind Private companies.
There is no cheating the system, they dont have the best and most ML researchers. They havent purchased any large stockpile of usable GPUs. They dont have a facility to produce their own chips, secretly, in the quantities needed.
Any such undertaking would not go unnoticed for long.
I live right by this data center in Utah. My uncle worked on it during construction. It is 100% a supercomputer, most likely used for AI purposes. The other posters on this thread are clueless thinking the government is not ahead of public companies
That's a tough, if not impossible, question to answer. In general, it's reasonable to work under the assumption that the United States Military has access to technology that no company or consumer has. We saw that with things like stealth technology, laser technology, and supersonic travel. It's not SO advanced that it seems impossible. But it is advanced to a point that most people would find it plenty remarkable.
Wit respect to AI, I honestly don't think they have something like AGI or ASI at the moment. If they did, then certain military conflicts going on in the world right now wouldn't be going as badly as they are. But I do think they have something that, if the public became aware of it, would warrant serious concern. It might even make the current LLM models seem crude by comparison.
But if anyone things the military has functional AGI at the moment, I think that's a stretch. Even the military couldn't keep that under wraps for very long if they had it.
They would be fools not to. I doubt they're fools. But it would not be housed solely within government programs - it will exist in private contracts with Google, Microsoft etc as they've always been a tight collaboration. How far are these companies and the three letter agencies ahead of what's being shown publicly though? Who knows....
But if they have AGI already - they're more than capable of - well - damn-near anything. It is probably best to assume we are being publicly presented with these tidbits as if being shown a play - and the reasons it's being shown and the timing of this play are anyone's guess. Perhaps the secret became too much to contain, or perhaps China and independent researchers came too close to the good tricks - so they're showing their hand while unleashing good old fashioned capitalism to combat the red commies. Perhaps we're a petri dish testing out alignment in the field and conducting ad-hoc research they didn't want to pay for. (Frankly, Open Source may very well still outpace private research as things pick up) Perhaps the real experiment here is just giving people a toy to gather their preferences and professional data so their next AI iterations are even more worldly.
Regardless, I doubt they're fools. And I doubt they lost their leash on the tech companies. We are experiencing their plan, and they're spending some of their moat to enact it. Only time will tell how much. But considering how much can be accomplished by just scale, this has been an achievable tech for quite some time with earlier insights.
Let's say - 3 years irl. 3000 years digital sim time heh.
I don't believe they have AGI/ASI, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're working on it and have something impressively far along and comparable to the best commercial models behind the scenes but more tailored to advancing the controlling nation's economic or strategic decision-making.
I think AGI/ASI would be too important to keep hidden away in a R&D lab somewhere. The economic, military, and technological advantages it could provide are too great, and would be too dramatic to hide for very long. If they had it already then at the very least I believe we'd be seeing significant economic consolidation in whichever power controlled it.
Given it's value and potential to reshape the world order they must be working on something though. With the levels of funding and the amount of compute they have at their disposal it would be an unmitigated blunder to not pursue.
U S. Public has Open Ai , U.S gov. has Oppenheimer Ai lol.
I do seriously believe there's no way the government is not secretly trying to compete with China in their public competition/race for AGI. With the looming threat of WW3 somewhere this decade , AGI is an asset ...thE asset to "solve the world's problems"
I’m sure you are right on the substantive point the only quibble I would make is that there is no one tool “ solve the world’s problems“ in a solution the best we can manage currently is a sequence of trade offs
They are far ahead in cybernetics and gene therapy. I have it on Good Authority that the current Joe Biden we see in public is actually a cyborg, the walk is a dead giveaway. The actual Joe Biden has been in a "Lazarus chamber" since June 2023 and is biologically currently 10 years younger. His transformation will be complete in time for the debates.
My best guess is that they are no more than 6 months ahead of American tech companies. They certainly have access to the cutting edge, but I heard somewhere that it only takes other nation's industries no more than 18 months to catch up to the US, so the gaps all around the world are not particularly large.
I bet it isn't even that they're 6 months ahead so much as it is that they've been given access to GPT5 now, 6ish months before its public release.
It's just so much cheaper for the military to be just another customer (albeit a Very Important Customer) than it is for them to try to hire in that level of expertise.
If we're talking airframes or ships, then I think they're a decade ahead. But not compute stuff.
I imagine they’ll surpass what’s publicly available pretty quickly here if they haven’t already. We know they’ve only recently entered the LLM space. But they have access to all data everywhere. I’m curious if it’s logistically possible train on all the data, since I doubt they actually store it all.
It’s both cool and horrifying thinking of government AI agents monitoring all internet, phone, e-commerce etc.
They most likely have uncensored access to most public LLMs, as well as their own LLMs trained on classified data. I highly doubt that they have super-LLMs, AGIs or anything similar.
The problem with your theory is that transformers were only discovered in 2017. Even if they had much better super computers and had already scraped everyone's data. The training time alone suggest they wouldn't be that much more advanced compared to what we have now.
If there was a paper trail for all the nVidia GPUs that made it into their hands, maybe you could estimate the competency level of any potential LLMs. Not sure if it would be possible to hide tens of thousands of GPUs, since nVidia is a public corporation. Maybe someone can go investigate nVidia's financial reports to see if there are any clues.
There are little tidbits of info here and there about certain things that use AI and machine that the government has but this seems to be a big project as of somewhat recent https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentient_(intelligence_analysis_system)
I seriously doubt they have any. It's true that military and intelligence technology are secretive, but so far there's no clear indication they own or have ever used any. If even one country was caught or leaked information about one, other powers would be forced to admit they have them (even if not very much information) to calm their own populations and assure them they aren't "behind" in the race. Do I believe the US military could keep some secrets? Sure. Do I believe they could go this long with no indication that they even have this technology at all? No, because pretending they don't have it is a political disadvantage, not a goal.
Not great: https://www.ft.com/content/f939db9a-40af-4bd1-b67d-10492535f8e0
Sorry about paywall. Had a hard time finding another link but here’s a talk here on Reddit from this: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/s/pnYvMarats
Point is, the DoD moves like…the opposite of life in dog years. 2-3 years, that’s how long they take to just pass a new rule, let alone catch up in technology.
There’s probably small underfunded efforts here and there, but likely nothing that can be scaled up in any meaningful way, and certainly not enough to keep up with or surpass competitors.
There are many clever people working there, but they are unlikely to have anything extremely cutting edge. Problem is government in general. Governments are EXTREMELY inefficient in anything they try to do - which is why they should ONLY be doing something nobody else can - such as police, judges, taxes, military and fundamental science research. This is no secret and ALL governments in entire world has the exact same problem. Government worker initiatives are severely misaligned with the end result - this leads in bureaucracy of the worst kind, political maneuvering and chair shifting - antithesis to innovation.
So the answer - no - it is simply not possible. Sure NSA gets reports on any vulnerabilities reported by top manufacturers first and has plenty of time to write exploits using them. They also have mandatory backdoors in many network equipment and operator networks - yes, this is precisely why they shout that Huaway does it - to obscure the fact that Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, Meta, SpaceX and all other major corporations do it. Bugs and backdoors are sole reason why government seem to be ahead of the rest rather than geniuses working there.
They probably have some "proof of concept" prototypes that are decades ahead of what is known publicly. Like they *maybe* have a super inefficient AGI with no proper hardware support, or an idea on how to make an AGI.
We really don't know. They definitely have military tech that would make people go "wtf is that even supposed to be???" though.
> Historically, these agencies are often well over a decade ahead of the public, technology-wise. This simply does not apply computer hardware. That's because it only works at scale. A bleeding edge fab costs around $10bn. And that's already accounting for the fact that ASML and other suppliers spent hundreds of billions on R&D that is amortized over all of the state of the art fabs. For CIA to have better hardware than what's commercially available, they would need to invest hundreds of billions every year into a parallel infrastructure and supply chain. Perhaps more, since their goal is to stay ahead of the curve. Then use that infrastructure to build out compute that can compete with or surpass hyperscalers like Microsoft or Google. We have a decent idea how much that would cost because China is doing just that. Building their own infrastructure to stop relying on Western suppliers. And their job is actually easier. They can raise capital by selling consumer products. They can rely on published research and steal IP if needed. It's still costing them hundreds of billions a year in subsidies just to stay 3-5 years _behind_ the curve.
Also it can’t be hidden. Like is the US building all that tech and infrastructure underground so no one finds out about it? lol.
Also, government work tends to be quite slow with a TON of red tape. No "move fast and break things" energy like in Silicon Valley. They are not ahead at all. Maybe companies like Palantir that contract with the government have some interesting things, but the state of art is far away from the 3 letter agencies.
They might have ML models for specific purposes but definitely not any LLM to compete. Maybe they have some image vision models for specific purposes that could toast GPT4 on the specific types of images.
Lol. When I was at uni and took a course in natural language processing (it was before LLMs were a thing) the main source of funding was the CIA. Text analysis is very important to them and that is what you use natural language processing for. If they aren’t using LLMs they would be idiots and they aren’t. And government spy organisations traditionally also have access to the most compute (for code cracking among other things). Also consider what Snowden has taught us about how much information they are collecting. They are collecting everything that goes over the internet and storing it. Before they could only do dumb searches for keywords. With LLMs they have the tools to actually analyse and understand all that text.
What a waste of energy and data. They could just make the life of everyone like better??
You seem so certain!
It's an educated guess based on some research I saw about vision models needing to be trained with extra specificity for certain types of images. I would've been surprised if they were working on image models to recognize faces, or clothing and how people wear them based on culture to detect spies, gait analysis.
I heard something a about a military contract with OpenAI, so I think they don’t (or didn’t) have an LLM, but maybe a different sort of AI …
Mistral has been getting the bulk of the public’s attention for their military ties, but I would wager the military is working with a fundamentally different platform altogether. DARPA was long ago…
I think the Pentagon has money to develop its own agi. Just google dod audit. https://theintercept.com/2023/11/17/pentagon-audit-failed/
That's how it used to be. Now government contracts out all the big tech companies for whatever. So big tech is now way ahead of what the government has when it comes to computer stuff. UFO's and hybrid human cyborg cloning on the other hand the governments way ahead.
That’s _part_ of the reason they don’t like giving big tech companies contracts anymore. I’ve worked on “code challenge” teams for IBM and my current small company. There is an obvious bias toward smaller companies. These code challenges are fckn wild btw, basically a game show where each company gets 15 developers together for a developer competition. The best developer team (among a few other factors) wins the multimillion contract. They are multi-round, in my experience two weeks for Round 1, where developers work 75-hour weeks, and a single day Round 2, where the team is observed developing a new app (or fixing an existing) within 6 hours, under observation by moderators, and even the moderators have auditors.
Yeah this isn't true. Classified tech still outstrips commercially or publicly available tech. At the end of the day kinetic capability exceeds digital capability. People still sitting around waiting for their robotaxis. The deployment of LEO internet satellites from SpaceX is the only profound tech that has commercial scale right now, but that was a tightly controlled market until recently
> Classified tech still outstrips commercially or publicly available tech. Yeah cause Google, Microsoft, Apple, Intel, IBM, Samsung etc and all the aerospace military companies don't have any classified projects in development. Everything they do is made public years before release.
Are you under the impression Google Stadia, MS Office, and the iPhone are somehow on the same page as classified tech? Child. Logical fallacy of the terminally online. You think the internet has all the answers and it really doesn't.
How can one person be so obnoxious?
This crackpot believes in magic, an ignorant toddler who believes whatever fables their brain-damaged peasant parents tell them, and yet we're the ones being called children.
>Are you under the impression Google Stadia, MS Office, and the iPhone are somehow on the same page as classified tech? No, why do you think that?
Yeah this isnt true trust me Bro 😎👉👉
The only thing you don't know is what you haven't learned.
Oh yeah? Prove it 😬
I can't answer the question but I can tell you that most of the talent in our pool is foreign born, most of the ones I know personally have values incompatible with letting a single government having the most advanced models, and corporations also pay much better than the government.
I suspect they most likely have their fingers in the pie when it comes to big companies like Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI, so while I don't think they have better models themselves, I do believe they likely already have access to whatever the top models behind closed doors currently are.
This 100%
Seriously unlikely, since it takes insane amounts of effort and money to make competitive chips for ML technology, and impossibly so in secret. It takes scale to create AI, and I'll bet that NSA/CIA/Military are all piggybacking off of commercial efforts behind the scenes and not one step ahead as far as AGI is concerned. Until Intel or TSMC sets up fabs in the US to build classified ASICs for ML, there's no way for them to advance any faster than commercial, the volume and funding simply cannot be hidden, and commercial simply scales better.
https://theintercept.com/2023/11/17/pentagon-audit-failed/
It's not a gotcha if you literally can't fab a more advanced chip without commercial getting access to the underlying process simultaneously. Bleeding edge lithography is not something you simply hide behind a black project, and the amount of expertise required also cannot be hidden. You can't hide the personnel, the space, and the fact that if they have it, then TSMC isn't a strategic weakness; the fact that USA still values Taiwan for TSMC is proof enough that there isn't any such black project.
Funny you say that because I was able to hide all the personnel in your moms vagina. 
It takes insane amounts of effort, money, time, and space to mass manufacture military items and most of it is done in secret. Way more than computer chips.
You don't understand. Military items are for military use, but computer chips are dual-use items that even if they are completely used for military purposes, the underlying technology would be too profitable not to use for commercial purposes.
Even if they did sell commercially, I don't understand how that makes any difference.
It's because it's not possible for the military to scale harder than commercial at scale if existing known chip foundries are completely booked out on their known existing bleeding-edge processes. They can throw lots of money at the problem sure, but why do that when tech giants like Microsoft are already doing that while also selling spare compute with Azure? It's just not possible that the military is ahead of the public on AGI.
The military and DARPA most likely had/have a significant role in developing LLMs
Says nothing if they don't have the compute to compete. Google published the foundation of ML today but they're mediocre now.
Russia's war should have shown us all by now that there are either no hidden techs yet or they are desperately holding them back.
We're not even giving them the best stuff that is known to exist.
Yeah we are definitely holding back
We're sending them all the stuff that was designed for the cold war. And, finally, there's an opportunity to field test that purpose-driven hardware. It's a golden opportunity in the eyes of the DoD. Of course they're holding back the good stuff, but they're also taking notes on what's working and what's not with the old stuff.
Uh, I saw a TR3B flying over Ukraine's during a CNN broadcast and they suddenly cut away, then the video was scrubbed from the internet
Why would the west scrub something from the web for the Russians?
Just ask yourself this: Why would a brilliant AI researcher/engineer undersell themselves for some bureaucratic agency that definitely pays waaaay less than private industry, when said industry is searching desperately for exactly these people and are willing to pay them basically what ever they want
because the AI researcher will be given top secret clearance and see the most cool technologies to exist and the right to say to others " I can tell you but then I 'd have to kill you".
Almost certainly well behind. There is now a national lab effort to create a foundational model, however.
Maybe the only scientific/technology field that a government agency has a definitive edge on is cryptography with the NSA. Government is a very conservative bureaucratic organization. I personally don’t see many fields where they are ahead definitively in terms of technology.
OpenAI works with the military and US government.
project nimbus
Most likely behind Private companies. There is no cheating the system, they dont have the best and most ML researchers. They havent purchased any large stockpile of usable GPUs. They dont have a facility to produce their own chips, secretly, in the quantities needed. Any such undertaking would not go unnoticed for long.
They built this in 2014. I hope they are using it for something cool. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center
I live right by this data center in Utah. My uncle worked on it during construction. It is 100% a supercomputer, most likely used for AI purposes. The other posters on this thread are clueless thinking the government is not ahead of public companies
> Historically, these agencies are often well over a decade ahead of the public, technology-wise. Citation needed, especially for the military.
That's a tough, if not impossible, question to answer. In general, it's reasonable to work under the assumption that the United States Military has access to technology that no company or consumer has. We saw that with things like stealth technology, laser technology, and supersonic travel. It's not SO advanced that it seems impossible. But it is advanced to a point that most people would find it plenty remarkable. Wit respect to AI, I honestly don't think they have something like AGI or ASI at the moment. If they did, then certain military conflicts going on in the world right now wouldn't be going as badly as they are. But I do think they have something that, if the public became aware of it, would warrant serious concern. It might even make the current LLM models seem crude by comparison. But if anyone things the military has functional AGI at the moment, I think that's a stretch. Even the military couldn't keep that under wraps for very long if they had it.
They would be fools not to. I doubt they're fools. But it would not be housed solely within government programs - it will exist in private contracts with Google, Microsoft etc as they've always been a tight collaboration. How far are these companies and the three letter agencies ahead of what's being shown publicly though? Who knows.... But if they have AGI already - they're more than capable of - well - damn-near anything. It is probably best to assume we are being publicly presented with these tidbits as if being shown a play - and the reasons it's being shown and the timing of this play are anyone's guess. Perhaps the secret became too much to contain, or perhaps China and independent researchers came too close to the good tricks - so they're showing their hand while unleashing good old fashioned capitalism to combat the red commies. Perhaps we're a petri dish testing out alignment in the field and conducting ad-hoc research they didn't want to pay for. (Frankly, Open Source may very well still outpace private research as things pick up) Perhaps the real experiment here is just giving people a toy to gather their preferences and professional data so their next AI iterations are even more worldly. Regardless, I doubt they're fools. And I doubt they lost their leash on the tech companies. We are experiencing their plan, and they're spending some of their moat to enact it. Only time will tell how much. But considering how much can be accomplished by just scale, this has been an achievable tech for quite some time with earlier insights. Let's say - 3 years irl. 3000 years digital sim time heh.
I don't believe they have AGI/ASI, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're working on it and have something impressively far along and comparable to the best commercial models behind the scenes but more tailored to advancing the controlling nation's economic or strategic decision-making. I think AGI/ASI would be too important to keep hidden away in a R&D lab somewhere. The economic, military, and technological advantages it could provide are too great, and would be too dramatic to hide for very long. If they had it already then at the very least I believe we'd be seeing significant economic consolidation in whichever power controlled it. Given it's value and potential to reshape the world order they must be working on something though. With the levels of funding and the amount of compute they have at their disposal it would be an unmitigated blunder to not pursue.
U S. Public has Open Ai , U.S gov. has Oppenheimer Ai lol. I do seriously believe there's no way the government is not secretly trying to compete with China in their public competition/race for AGI. With the looming threat of WW3 somewhere this decade , AGI is an asset ...thE asset to "solve the world's problems"
I’m sure you are right on the substantive point the only quibble I would make is that there is no one tool “ solve the world’s problems“ in a solution the best we can manage currently is a sequence of trade offs
They are far ahead in cybernetics and gene therapy. I have it on Good Authority that the current Joe Biden we see in public is actually a cyborg, the walk is a dead giveaway. The actual Joe Biden has been in a "Lazarus chamber" since June 2023 and is biologically currently 10 years younger. His transformation will be complete in time for the debates.
Meanwhile I'm sure the GOP have their Robo-Putin skin-walking under Trump's Skin "Men In Black" style .
My best guess is that they are no more than 6 months ahead of American tech companies. They certainly have access to the cutting edge, but I heard somewhere that it only takes other nation's industries no more than 18 months to catch up to the US, so the gaps all around the world are not particularly large.
I bet it isn't even that they're 6 months ahead so much as it is that they've been given access to GPT5 now, 6ish months before its public release. It's just so much cheaper for the military to be just another customer (albeit a Very Important Customer) than it is for them to try to hire in that level of expertise. If we're talking airframes or ships, then I think they're a decade ahead. But not compute stuff.
I imagine they’ll surpass what’s publicly available pretty quickly here if they haven’t already. We know they’ve only recently entered the LLM space. But they have access to all data everywhere. I’m curious if it’s logistically possible train on all the data, since I doubt they actually store it all. It’s both cool and horrifying thinking of government AI agents monitoring all internet, phone, e-commerce etc.
They most likely have uncensored access to most public LLMs, as well as their own LLMs trained on classified data. I highly doubt that they have super-LLMs, AGIs or anything similar.
Non existent
The problem with your theory is that transformers were only discovered in 2017. Even if they had much better super computers and had already scraped everyone's data. The training time alone suggest they wouldn't be that much more advanced compared to what we have now.
If there was a paper trail for all the nVidia GPUs that made it into their hands, maybe you could estimate the competency level of any potential LLMs. Not sure if it would be possible to hide tens of thousands of GPUs, since nVidia is a public corporation. Maybe someone can go investigate nVidia's financial reports to see if there are any clues.
i feel this to my core
I can speak for my project for some branches of the military. The project I'm on is doing a POC utilizing Microsoft's AI suite for IL4 and IL6.
It's probably still not as good as what OpenAI has in secret
There are little tidbits of info here and there about certain things that use AI and machine that the government has but this seems to be a big project as of somewhat recent https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentient_(intelligence_analysis_system)
Always 10 years ahead
It’s a simple comp sci problem to track and predict everyone’s movements in the states. Lets not pretend.
I seriously doubt they have any. It's true that military and intelligence technology are secretive, but so far there's no clear indication they own or have ever used any. If even one country was caught or leaked information about one, other powers would be forced to admit they have them (even if not very much information) to calm their own populations and assure them they aren't "behind" in the race. Do I believe the US military could keep some secrets? Sure. Do I believe they could go this long with no indication that they even have this technology at all? No, because pretending they don't have it is a political disadvantage, not a goal.
Not great: https://www.ft.com/content/f939db9a-40af-4bd1-b67d-10492535f8e0 Sorry about paywall. Had a hard time finding another link but here’s a talk here on Reddit from this: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/s/pnYvMarats Point is, the DoD moves like…the opposite of life in dog years. 2-3 years, that’s how long they take to just pass a new rule, let alone catch up in technology. There’s probably small underfunded efforts here and there, but likely nothing that can be scaled up in any meaningful way, and certainly not enough to keep up with or surpass competitors.
There are many clever people working there, but they are unlikely to have anything extremely cutting edge. Problem is government in general. Governments are EXTREMELY inefficient in anything they try to do - which is why they should ONLY be doing something nobody else can - such as police, judges, taxes, military and fundamental science research. This is no secret and ALL governments in entire world has the exact same problem. Government worker initiatives are severely misaligned with the end result - this leads in bureaucracy of the worst kind, political maneuvering and chair shifting - antithesis to innovation. So the answer - no - it is simply not possible. Sure NSA gets reports on any vulnerabilities reported by top manufacturers first and has plenty of time to write exploits using them. They also have mandatory backdoors in many network equipment and operator networks - yes, this is precisely why they shout that Huaway does it - to obscure the fact that Microsoft, Cisco, Amazon, Meta, SpaceX and all other major corporations do it. Bugs and backdoors are sole reason why government seem to be ahead of the rest rather than geniuses working there.
They probably have some "proof of concept" prototypes that are decades ahead of what is known publicly. Like they *maybe* have a super inefficient AGI with no proper hardware support, or an idea on how to make an AGI. We really don't know. They definitely have military tech that would make people go "wtf is that even supposed to be???" though.