Comment by BiscuitBadger 3 days ago
There have to be GovCloud only LLMs just for this case.
I swear this government is headed by appointed nephews of appointed nephews.
I keep thinking back about that Chernobyl miniseries; head of the science department used to run a shoe factory. No one needs to be competent at their job anymore
> So obviously they don't think it's safe to use broadly.
More likely, everything gets added to the list because there shouldn't be false positives, it's worth investigating to make sure there isn't an adjacent gap in the security systems.
You are uploading information to the chat system every time you use it. Doubly true if you’re having it analyze or work with documents.
I presume pulling this data out is simple if you’re, say, China.
There really no security to investigate. Without a private instance, it’s an absolute non-starter for anything classified.
> presume pulling this data out is simple if you’re, say, China
Why would you presume that?
Somehow I think that the weak link in our government security is at the top - the President, his cabinet, and various heads of agencies. Because nobody questions what they're allowed to do, and so they're exempt from various common-sense security protocols. We already saw some pretty egregious security breaches from Pete Hegseth.
That's also the case in businesses. No one denies the CEO a security exemption.
I have never worked in a company where an obviously incorrect CEO-demanded security exemption (like this one) would have been allowed to pass. Professionalism, boards (with a mandatory employee member/representative, after some size) and ethics exist.
30 years in about 8 software companies, Northern Europe. Often startups. Between 4 to 600 people. When they grow large the work often turns boring, so it's time to find something smaller again.
Why would you? He’s literally the only person ostensibly in charge of the direction of the company. Destroying the company through a security exemption or a bad business deal - both are the leader making a poor decision due directly to his seat of power.
Give sound advice of course, but ultimately it’s the exec’s decision make.
Been there. The CEO of an internet security company was the one who clicked on the wrong email attachment and turned a virus loose.
I mean, I don't know if he had a security exemption, or if anyone who clicked on it would have infected us. But he was the weak link, at least in that instance.
whether he is personally and directly responsible for this specific incident, his leadership absolutely sets the tone for the rest of the federal government.
Humans generally find "food safety expert sickens guests with tuna salad he left out overnight on warm countertop" to be a far more damning charge than "fire safety expert sickens ... warm countertop".
Dig up a live mic catching Hillary calling the IOC a bunch of self-serving scum just as Obama was begging them to award the 2016 Olympics to Chicago, and we might call it comparable.
> I swear this government is headed by appointed nephews of appointed nephews.
Don't forget the Large Adult Sons!
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-land-...
> No one needs to be competent at their job anymore
That's actually the whole point. Placing incompetents in positions of authority means they know absolutely to whom they owe their loyalty. Because they know they would never have that job on merit. And since they don't really know how to do the job, they have no moral qualms about doing a poor job, or strong opinions on what they should be doing -- other than whatever mission their patron has given them. It's a tool used by weak leaders and it's unfortunately very effective.
> I swear this government is headed by appointed nephews of appointed nephews.
No joke, the previous head of the State Department task force tasked with fighting corruption and nepotism in international contracting was named Rich Nephew. (He's a very talented career civil servant and I mean no shade I just find that hilarious.)
DEI at its worst is exactly what you say. (At its best, it's "we hire for abilities, but we also look for abilities in non-traditional people".
But, even though that's what DEI can be, not all "someone got a git not because of ability" is DEI. Cronyism, racism, and sexism all do that, too.
In the case of this administration, I think the traditional term is "yes men" - people who are hired not for ability, but because they will not say no to the boss.
They say that most fascist governments fall apart because they actively despise competence, which it turns out you need if you are trying to run a country.
Competence gives way to ideology.
I once read an interesting book on the economy of Nazi Germany. There were a lot of smart CEOs and high ranking civil servants who perfectly predicted US industrial might.
They say it, but they're wrong. Historically speaking there have been basically about 2 fascist governments, and they fell because they lost wars. And Germany, for one, did run them with high competence, to the extend that it took years for many countries to do anything about.
It we loosen "fascist" to just mean any authoritarian government, there are many that run of very long time.
WWII started in 1939 and was done in early 1945, so it didn't take that long.
More importantly, maybe the Nazi's were competent at first, but they absolutely fell apart internally due to mistrust, back stabbing, and demanding of loyalty above all else. Hitler famously made many poor military decisions.
The Nazis were in power for years before they started WWII.
> There have to be GovCloud only LLMs just for this case.
I hear Los Alamos labs has an LLM that makes ChatGPT look like a toy. And then there's Sentinel, which may be the same thing I'm not sure.
And we all heard they reverse engineered alien anti gravity technology in the 80s.
All I've heard was that they were aware it's anti gravity. Nothing about reverse engineering.
Care to say more about that?
Bob Lazar claims he was allocated in this project where not only they found working device capable of emiting gravitational waves out of phase with earth gravitational waves, but they achieved the same effect bombarding a mysterious unknown at the time element. He called the material element115 (the logical guess, element 114 properties was known/was synthesized), while emiting one proton and decaying back to element 115 the effect was achieved.
Apparently he was in fact allocated on a top secret project at los Alamos and his expertise was alternative propulsion back everything else is folklore, but it is deep folklore if you're interested in conspiracy theories
The article says
> [ChatGPT] is blocked for other Department of Homeland Security staff. Gottumukkala “was granted permission to use ChatGPT with DHS controls in place,” adding that the use was “short-term and limited.”
He had a special exemption to use it as head of Cyber and still got flagged by cybersecurity checks. So obviously they don't think it's safe to use broadly.
They already have a deal with OpenAI to build a government focused one https://openai.com/global-affairs/introducing-chatgpt-gov/