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- Hacker News
- Obviously. The amount of data they hold on the American public alone is massive. They can't possibly read it all, they need a system that can pull out "dangerous" people, and find dirt on whoever they want to target, and AI will happily do that, badly. I just hope they actually take the time to review what it gives them for accuracy so that they don't end up doing the NSA equivalent of bombing and murdering a bunch of elementary school children. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Minab_school_attack
The NSA aren't the only ones with massive troves of very personal data on large numbers of people. Many companies are excited to use AI to help them use all of that information to their maximum advantage and you can bet that they won't care about spending the time/money on perfect accuracy as long as over the long run they get positive results.
by autoexec - What do they test? In general, I don't understand the whole "AI safety" stuff. What are the scenarios we need to be protected from and how is this going to be accomplished?by vjvjvjvjghv
- Does anyone here happen to know the ballpark number of how much the three letters agencies are currently paying OpenAI/antropic/who ever per year/month..?by rand846633
- An underappreciated aspect of LLMs is how good they are at zero-shot classification. I'd expect this is extremely good at monitoring communications streams, particularly in foreign languages.by jawiggins
- Why wouldn’t they be? How is this surprising. A drop in the bucket.by hosel
- "Testing"? Sure, Jan.
They would have to be incompetent if they were not using them both for security penetration as well as social engineering / election meddling as everyone else is.
by bhouston - I guess I would be more surprised if the headline said "turns out NSA dropped the ball on AI and haven't even fired up a single LLM instance yet".
It's mostly about "testing" and "billions". But I am sure "testing" here is in quotes just like I wrote it. They are not going to get an itemized list unless it's coming from Snowden 2.0
- We "tested AI" on this Russian nuclear silo command and control center. It worked out pretty ok.
by rdtsc - I feel like any AI regulation passed wouldn't have enough teeth to rein in the NSA because not even the Fourth Amendment seems applicable to the agency. let's not forget the ex-post-facto legalization of mass wiretapping and surveillance [0] with both establishment political parties supporting it on 'national security' concerns [1]. whatever monitoring or testing they're doing today will be similarly hand-waved away in the name of security theater
this is just how the empire has always operated - we have always been at war with Eastasia
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_(...
[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/10/fact-check-obamas-misl...
by paimapi