Let me take the opposing position about a program to wire LLMs into their already-advanced sensory database.

I assume the CIA is lying about simulating world leaders. These are narcissistic personalities and it’s jarring to hear that they can be replaced, either by a body double or an indistinguishable chatbot. Also, it’s still cheaper to have humans do this.

More likely, the CIA is modeling its own experts. Not as useful a press release and not as impressive to the fractious executive branch. But consider having downtime as a CIA expert on submarine cables. You might be predicting what kind of available data is capable of predicting the cause and/or effect of cuts. Ten years ago, an ensemble of such models was state of the art, but its sensory libraries were based on maybe traceroute and marine shipping. With an LLM, you can generate a whole lot of training data that an expert can refine during his/her downtime. Maybe there’s a potent new data source that an expensive operation could unlock. That ensemble of ML models from ten years ago can still be refined.

And then there’s modeling things that don’t exist. Maybe it’s important to optimize a statement for its disinfo potency. Try it harmlessly on LLMs fed event data. What happens if some oligarch retires unexpectedly? Who rises? That kind of stuff.

To your last point, with this executive branch, I expect their very first question to CIA wasn’t about aliens or which nations have a copy of a particular tape of Trump, but can you make us money. So the approaches above all have some way of producing business intelligence. Whereas a Kim Jong Un bobblehead does not.