Such a secret government AI organization could take advantage of the openness in the field of AI, as it could absorb information about the advances of others, but would not be not legally obliged to share its own achievements. Thus, it would always outperform the current state of public knowledge. Governmental organizations have used this type of advantage before to dominate in cryptography.
This is a small issue that doesn’t affect your overall point, but I previously worked in cryptography so know a bit about what was happening with the state of the art, and generally we consider the NSA to be 20-30 years ahead of publicly available research and that the NSA mathematicians mostly ignore academia because it’s behind (although a few folks watch to keep tabs on what’s become public and so no longer has a plausible secrecy advantage).
Further, the NSA and CIA have a history of both directly discouraging publication of results that will make known math that was previously powering secret cryptographic technology (see the history of RSA for an example) and encouraging research in directions that they already know to be flawed but will result in exploitable technology for a 20-30 year period (see elliptic-curve cryptography).
So as it turns out the NSA doesn’t seem to benefit at all from academia, and instead mostly tries aggressively to stay ahead of it, keep its results secret, and do what it can to interfere with public knowledge to assure it maintains a strategic advantage.
Good point—but it raises the question: is NSA 20-30 years ahead of the public research in AI? If yes, they should be close to AGI. If no, why they miss the opportunity?
I have no reason to believe that they are since they are primarily focused on signal intelligence and until very recently the key insights here all seemed to come from number theory, measure theory, linear algebra, and a few other fields of mathematics. Maybe the situation has changed some in the last 5 years, but last I checked they were still primarily interested in recruiting talented pure mathematicians, not the sorts of folks with engineering and programming expertise necessary to build AI.
This is a small issue that doesn’t affect your overall point, but I previously worked in cryptography so know a bit about what was happening with the state of the art, and generally we consider the NSA to be 20-30 years ahead of publicly available research and that the NSA mathematicians mostly ignore academia because it’s behind (although a few folks watch to keep tabs on what’s become public and so no longer has a plausible secrecy advantage).
Further, the NSA and CIA have a history of both directly discouraging publication of results that will make known math that was previously powering secret cryptographic technology (see the history of RSA for an example) and encouraging research in directions that they already know to be flawed but will result in exploitable technology for a 20-30 year period (see elliptic-curve cryptography).
So as it turns out the NSA doesn’t seem to benefit at all from academia, and instead mostly tries aggressively to stay ahead of it, keep its results secret, and do what it can to interfere with public knowledge to assure it maintains a strategic advantage.
Good point—but it raises the question: is NSA 20-30 years ahead of the public research in AI? If yes, they should be close to AGI. If no, why they miss the opportunity?
I have no reason to believe that they are since they are primarily focused on signal intelligence and until very recently the key insights here all seemed to come from number theory, measure theory, linear algebra, and a few other fields of mathematics. Maybe the situation has changed some in the last 5 years, but last I checked they were still primarily interested in recruiting talented pure mathematicians, not the sorts of folks with engineering and programming expertise necessary to build AI.