4 ms·

The civilian level is the state of the art. The chip industry is at the cutting edge, there is nothing beyond it that is available at scale, and in this instanc

The civilian level is the state of the art. The chip industry is at the cutting edge, there is nothing beyond it that is available at scale, and in this instance: scale matters! There are some small exceptions of course: RSFQ digital logic is insanely fast (hundreds of gigahertz), but nobody has scaled it to large integrated circuits. Supercomputers are built with somewhat esoteric parts, but not secret unobtainium. At least in principle the same RDMA switches and network components are commercially available. Similarly, the specialised CPUs like the NVIDIA Grace Hopper are available, although I doubt any wholesalers have it in stock! To believe otherwise is to believe that governments (plural!) have secretly hidden tens of billions in cutting edge chip fabs, tens of billions of chip design shops, and more. In reality the government buys their digital electronics from the same commercial suppliers you and I do. Only a handful of specialised circuits are made in secret, such as radar amplifiers.

aatd86 3y ago
Are processors and processor speed the only limiting factor in terms of applications? (probably that they are fast enough anyway, could be a non-factor, communication between neuron is not that fast compared to clock speed if I remember well) Especially in an era in which the recorded data can be fed to an algorithm that can approximate dynamic brain maps with more or less accuracy?
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  One concern is the lack of ethics, or more accurately, the different ethical considerations in the spy agencies. They have every motivation to capture personal phone calls and text chats in bulk and run them all through an LLM-like training regime so that they can ask it questions like: “Does so-and-so plan a terrorist attack?” Somewhere in an NSA data centre there is a model being trained on your emails, right now.

aatd86 3y ago

Are processors and processor speed the only limiting factor in terms of applications? (probably that they are fast enough anyway, could be a non-factor, communication between neuron is not that fast compared to clock speed if I remember well) Especially in an era in which the recorded data can be fed to an algorithm that can approximate dynamic brain maps with more or less accuracy?

jiggawatts 3y ago
One concern is the lack of ethics, or more accurately, the different ethical considerations in the spy agencies. They have every motivation to capture personal phone calls and text chats in bulk and run them all through an LLM-like training regime so that they can ask it questions like: “Does so-and-so plan a terrorist attack?” Somewhere in an NSA data centre there is a model being trained on your emails, right now.