It's highly improbable that the US government has a secret team inside Anthropic and OpenAI manipulating their training regimen. For better or worse, these companies are filled with ideologues and something that invasive would trigger an army of whistleblowers (despite legal consequences).

▲ booty 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

    It's highly improbable that the US government has a secret team inside Anthropic and OpenAI manipulating their training regimen.

Two thoughts.

One: it would be relatively technically trivial for $GOVERNMENT_AGENCY to just monitor all the prompts + context we send over the wire to OpenAI/Anthropic/etc. That's a goldmine of sensitive personal and corporate data, no secret team needed (although, the LLM providers obviously would need to cooperate)

Two: Rather than secret infiltration teams influencing model training I think what's more likely on the training side of things is simply self-censoring by the LLM providers, so that they don't risk angering the government.

I highly doubt that China has government interlopers, secret or otherwise, inside Qwen's training team. Nonetheless, "sensitive" issues like Tiananmen Square are censored. I would imagine that much/most such censorship in China is self-censorship that doesn't leave a legal/paper trail. That's what we're in danger of seeing (more of) in America IMO.

	▲	Barbing 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> relatively technically trivial for $GOVERNMENT_AGENCY to just monitor all the prompts + context we send I take this for granted given Room 641A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A Thus, I’ve pondered whether anything they’ve learned has changed the world / had a big impact (like on their understanding of human psychology, perhaps per region). They’ve heard phone calls, they’ve read emails, diaries get brought to court… but these are systems that would be used like diaries but also prompt users for more and more.
	▲	SoMomentary 23 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Having seen all the AI interactions that you can get through clickstream data I have no doubt that $GOVERNMENT_AGENCY can see much much more.

▲ throwaw12 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> secret team inside Anthropic and OpenAI manipulating their training regimen

You don't need a secret team to manipulate whats coming from them: https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-chatgpt/

▲ Planktonne 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> these companies are filled with ideologues

Are they? They don't behave like it.

▲ gmerc 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Its very hard to be so naive.

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SR2Z 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I think you are being ridiculous. Tampering with an LLMs pretraining is a difficult undertaking. There is plenty of evidence that training a model to walk the party line leaves it less capable than if it weren't.

It's not very subtle manipulation either; ask qwen of Taiwan is a part of China in German and in English and only the English answer will be party-approved.

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embedding-shape 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Compared to what we have proof the US government have engaged in before? Do people not remember PRISM anymore? It was virtually impossible to think of the scope before it was leaked, and you'd be marked as a conspiracy theorist for believing that happened, before it was made concretely true.

I think it's borderline naive to assume various agencies haven't infiltrated OpenAI, Anthropic and others, essentially the entire world was wiretapped by NSA in the past, to assume they don't have an employee or two at these companies does seem a bit naive to me.

	▲	logicchains 27 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Agencies like the CIA have infiltrated the news agencies, so they have indirect power over the information that LLMs consume.