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What are the chances that the CIA has a manhattan project style quantum computer somewhere? I can’t believe that if the current SOTA could break commonly used e

What are the chances that the CIA has a manhattan project style quantum computer somewhere? I can’t believe that if the current SOTA could break commonly used encryption methods that it would be widely known.

GTP 2y ago
I think it's still unlikely. In the case of the Manhattan project, the USA government wasn't racing against private companies but against other governments. Therefore, all advances in the field where highly secret. In this case, the CIA would be racing against private companies as well, which are hiring the best physicists and engineers too. So, while it's possible that a governmental agency is ahead of what it is publicly know, I doubt that they would be dramatically ahead. This is similar to part of the argument I would present if someone asks me why I believe cryptography in general is secure.
- zelon88 2y ago
  > In this case, the CIA would be racing against private companies as well... You mean like Skunkworks when they designed the SR-71? Or DARPA with Atlas? Or the DoD with the global GPS network? Or the NSA's ANT catalogue? Yeah, the government has never had any issues outpacing the private sector. You only ever find out about it when they want you to. Usually that happens 5 to 30 years after the market has already caught up.
  - XorNot 2y ago
    All your examples consist of things no company has any commercial incentive to do. Airlines don't want high altitude supersonic spy planes, for example. And GPS is a collective action problem: no one wants to pay for it, but we do all benefit from it being ambiently around.
fidotron 2y ago
It is basically a certainty that the CIA and NSA have their own projects, and also keep very close tabs on those outside - it is their exact remit. The great quantum computing nightmare, from the NSA point of view, is someone sidestepping out of nowhere with a viable machine that works in an unexpected and easy to reproduce way. Edit to add: see also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_computing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_computing which while bounded in the same sense as conventional machines would still be a game changer.
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  For similar reasons, if you do anything interesting in AI, you’re very much the type to be targeted with additional targeted surveillance. It’s sad to imagine the amount of smart nerds out there whose only actual experience with women is from the fking honeypots that Langley or ft mead et al use to make sure that some prospective AI talent on discord isn’t about to release a bioweapon. Clearly a lot of AI talent overlaps with incels and adjacent communities (see civit.ai as an example of this), It’s common knowledge that field agents skew female since they’re less suspected by patriarchal idiotic targets (they tout this in recruiting for DEI reasons). It’s probably smart for AI startups to tell their male coworkers to be on the lookout for random attractive women trying to talk to you. The US military and foreign service et al specifically warns its members about this and it is a clear and present danger. And FYI, if the glowies aren’t doing this, they’re not doing their jobs, since the risk of some crazy open source AI person deciding to lone wolf society is rather high, at least according to the less wrong folks (that community I bet is also crawling with spooks). AI is so full of industrial and business espionage that I get scared just being in the space. I know this is happening too because the private version of it, expert networks, are extraordinarily lucrative and rely on basically laundering of material non public information with plausible deniability. The “experts” on an “expert network” are basically private business spooks, ackin to a private investigator targeting a business.
- dekhn 2y ago
  I saw a lecture from the author of the first DNA computing paper ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Adleman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Adleman) in '94. We pulled him into a room after the talk (because he was talking about scaling up the computation significantly) and walked him through the calculations. BEcause the system he designed required a great deal of DNA to randomly bind to other DNA in a highly parallel fashion, you'd need enormous vats of liquid being rapidly stirred. Like other alternate forms of computing, the systems we build on CPUs today are truly hard to beat, partly because people are trained on those systems, partly becaus the high performance libraries are there, and partly because the vendors got good at make stupid codes run stupid fast. At this point I cannot see any specific QC that could be used repeatedly for productive work (material simulations, protein design) that would be more useful than a collection of entirely conventional computing (IE, a cluster with 20K CPUs, 10K GPUs, 100PB of storage, and a fast interconnect). Every time I see one of these "BMW is using a quantum computer to optimize logistics" and look more closely, it's obvious it's a PR toy problem, not something giving them a business edge.
naasking 2y ago
> What are the chances that the CIA has a manhattan project style quantum computer somewhere? Possible, but I think zero chance they have anything more practical than Google Willow, which is itself completely impractical for anything except quantum computing research.
dekhn 2y ago
The NSA maintains a fleet of oddball devices that give them unique capabilities. Usually these are built by big vendors, but sometimes by smaller companies with a unique feature (IBM Harvest, Connection Machine CM-5, Cray Various Models of *MP) It seems reasonable they have some small number of quantum computers that a limited number of researchers use to explore new ideas, but it's harder to imagine their production operations use QM for cryptologic or other computing. One of their big needs for production operations is having 24/7 support through christmas break, which favors companies like IBM.

GTP 2y ago

I think it's still unlikely. In the case of the Manhattan project, the USA government wasn't racing against private companies but against other governments. Therefore, all advances in the field where highly secret. In this case, the CIA would be racing against private companies as well, which are hiring the best physicists and engineers too. So, while it's possible that a governmental agency is ahead of what it is publicly know, I doubt that they would be dramatically ahead. This is similar to part of the argument I would present if someone asks me why I believe cryptography in general is secure.

zelon88 2y ago
> In this case, the CIA would be racing against private companies as well... You mean like Skunkworks when they designed the SR-71? Or DARPA with Atlas? Or the DoD with the global GPS network? Or the NSA's ANT catalogue? Yeah, the government has never had any issues outpacing the private sector. You only ever find out about it when they want you to. Usually that happens 5 to 30 years after the market has already caught up.
- XorNot 2y ago
  All your examples consist of things no company has any commercial incentive to do. Airlines don't want high altitude supersonic spy planes, for example. And GPS is a collective action problem: no one wants to pay for it, but we do all benefit from it being ambiently around.

fidotron 2y ago

It is basically a certainty that the CIA and NSA have their own projects, and also keep very close tabs on those outside - it is their exact remit. The great quantum computing nightmare, from the NSA point of view, is someone sidestepping out of nowhere with a viable machine that works in an unexpected and easy to reproduce way. Edit to add: see also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_computing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_computing which while bounded in the same sense as conventional machines would still be a game changer.

Der_Einzige 2y ago
For similar reasons, if you do anything interesting in AI, you’re very much the type to be targeted with additional targeted surveillance. It’s sad to imagine the amount of smart nerds out there whose only actual experience with women is from the fking honeypots that Langley or ft mead et al use to make sure that some prospective AI talent on discord isn’t about to release a bioweapon. Clearly a lot of AI talent overlaps with incels and adjacent communities (see civit.ai as an example of this), It’s common knowledge that field agents skew female since they’re less suspected by patriarchal idiotic targets (they tout this in recruiting for DEI reasons). It’s probably smart for AI startups to tell their male coworkers to be on the lookout for random attractive women trying to talk to you. The US military and foreign service et al specifically warns its members about this and it is a clear and present danger. And FYI, if the glowies aren’t doing this, they’re not doing their jobs, since the risk of some crazy open source AI person deciding to lone wolf society is rather high, at least according to the less wrong folks (that community I bet is also crawling with spooks). AI is so full of industrial and business espionage that I get scared just being in the space. I know this is happening too because the private version of it, expert networks, are extraordinarily lucrative and rely on basically laundering of material non public information with plausible deniability. The “experts” on an “expert network” are basically private business spooks, ackin to a private investigator targeting a business.
dekhn 2y ago
I saw a lecture from the author of the first DNA computing paper ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Adleman https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Adleman) in '94. We pulled him into a room after the talk (because he was talking about scaling up the computation significantly) and walked him through the calculations. BEcause the system he designed required a great deal of DNA to randomly bind to other DNA in a highly parallel fashion, you'd need enormous vats of liquid being rapidly stirred. Like other alternate forms of computing, the systems we build on CPUs today are truly hard to beat, partly because people are trained on those systems, partly becaus the high performance libraries are there, and partly because the vendors got good at make stupid codes run stupid fast. At this point I cannot see any specific QC that could be used repeatedly for productive work (material simulations, protein design) that would be more useful than a collection of entirely conventional computing (IE, a cluster with 20K CPUs, 10K GPUs, 100PB of storage, and a fast interconnect). Every time I see one of these "BMW is using a quantum computer to optimize logistics" and look more closely, it's obvious it's a PR toy problem, not something giving them a business edge.

naasking 2y ago

> What are the chances that the CIA has a manhattan project style quantum computer somewhere? Possible, but I think zero chance they have anything more practical than Google Willow, which is itself completely impractical for anything except quantum computing research.

dekhn 2y ago

The NSA maintains a fleet of oddball devices that give them unique capabilities. Usually these are built by big vendors, but sometimes by smaller companies with a unique feature (IBM Harvest, Connection Machine CM-5, Cray Various Models of *MP) It seems reasonable they have some small number of quantum computers that a limited number of researchers use to explore new ideas, but it's harder to imagine their production operations use QM for cryptologic or other computing. One of their big needs for production operations is having 24/7 support through christmas break, which favors companies like IBM.