I think people opposing this have a belief that the counterfactual is “USG doesn’t have LLMs” instead of “USG spins up its own LLM development effort using the NSA’s no-doubt-substantial GPU clusters”.
Needless to say, I think the latter is far more likely.
NSA building it is arguably better because atleast they won’t sell it to countries like Saudi Arabia, and they have better ability to prevent people quitting or diffusing knowledge and code to companies outside.
Also most people in SF agree working for the NSA is morally grey at best, and Anthropic won’t be telling everyone this is morally okay.
I think people opposing this have a belief that the counterfactual is “USG doesn’t have LLMs” instead of “USG spins up its own LLM development effort using the NSA’s no-doubt-substantial GPU clusters”.
Needless to say, I think the latter is far more likely.
NSA building it is arguably better because atleast they won’t sell it to countries like Saudi Arabia, and they have better ability to prevent people quitting or diffusing knowledge and code to companies outside.
Also most people in SF agree working for the NSA is morally grey at best, and Anthropic won’t be telling everyone this is morally okay.