> so unless the military ran a giant expensive program just to hide the fact that they actually had machines 10000x faster than the $50M (in 80s money) supercomputers of the day, and had trained them on a corpus they whipped up out of nowhere (the amount of information on the internet at the time could probably have fit on a few of todays phones), it probably didn't happen.

Well, did they? They do fritter away a lot of money. Maybe there's a long-running black budget somewhere that could account for it.

You are framing your argument in technologies and technological progressions that you are familiar with. Reality isn't so neat though and there are surely many technological paths to artificial intelligence they could have exploited.