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I believe what we are looking at is the outcome of Sam Altman's scheme.
Over the past week, Pete Hegseth and the DoD has repeatedly said things that were simple misconceptions about what Anthropic asked for, which were plainly contradicted by Anthropic's contract and Anthropic's public statements. At the same time, OpenAI was in ongoing talks to take Anthropic's business.
So, where did the misconceptions come from? Presumably, Altman. He had the positioning, the motive, and a well established history of executing similar political schemes.
Relatedly, two months ago OpenAI became Trump's top donor with a $25M donation to Trump's PAC. So, Hegseth and Trump didn't need to actually believe the lie, they just needed the lie to be good enough for a pretext.
And, I can't help but notice that Greg Brockman has been set up as a fall guy, here. If we live long enough for a change in administration, and the next administration decides to punish the people who most blatantly paid illegal bribes to Trump, it is Brockman's name on the headlines about the donation, not Altman's. But the money came out of the same pot, and it was presumably Altman who chose what those headlines would say.
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I am not saying this as a political insider. I'm saying "consider other hypotheses" and "avoid the base rate fallacy". Here, let me generate another hypothesis:
"It's been a decades long truism: NSA is drowning in data, but can't to turn it into intelligence. LLMs are the magic solution NSA's dreamt for for decades. But the only licensed classified LLM provider is stymieing progress because of the inclusion of domestic surveillance data. NSA has recently gained clout at the Pentagon: the success of Maduro, and Iran's top 40 military leaders killed the f...
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You say there was too much agreement with OP, but it looks to me like there wasn’t much. 10 net agree votes and ten 10% likely or 25% likely reacts at time of writing.
This post is a container for my short-form writing. See this post for meta-level discussion about shortform.