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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13155 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 20, 2026

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empty hype about "stochastic parrots"

This has nothing to do with stochastic parrots, even bringing it up is a non sequitur that detracts from your argument. Any differentiating hype is good hype. Mythos already plucked the low hanging fruit of "our model can find all the zero-day exploits", OpenAI can't just copy it. They need to show their model is more "intelligent", it goes beyond capabilities. Saying that their model can be independently deployed to solve problems in very capable ways plays very well IC and military folks. Some CIA cyber guy reads this and says "give me it for a billion, I want to sick it on iran"

Some CIA cyber guy reads this and says "give me it for a billion, I want to sick it on iran"

This could have been accomplished with a red-teaming demo. What the CIA guy sees here is "if I try to sic this on Iran, it might get caught hacking into DoD instead".

What the CIA guy sees

Uh no, speaking from experience that is not what they see. To reinforce my opinion, I just walked down the hall and chatted with a former agency guy about this.

EDIT: I'm actually willing to double down, and volunteer that I was just talking with DARPA PMs last week about this exact capability, specifically the ability to task a swarm of agents with a nebulous task in an adversarial environment and have them solve the problem out of the box on their own. The story presented in the most favorable light is literally that or sufficiently technically adjacent to it. DARPA PMs don't talk about ideas that they have belief to think are sufficiently do-able at the current technology level (tho skepticism about government competence is never misplaced even if DARPA PMs themselves tend to be pretty informed/competent)

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