no secret labs
believing that the government has access to significantly advanced technology on all dimensions is a pretty classic world model failure. reveals a kind of fractally wrong way of understanding pretty adjacent to a lot of forms of conspiracy theory addicts and UFO truthers.
certainly we can't prove a negative, it's always possible the government is covering many things up. certainly it is the case that the government has had access to technology decades ahead of what was disclosed to the public in many areas on many occasions. certainly it is very likely they currently have extremely advanced and completely unknown military tech.
but the US government does not have an iPhone 30. they can't pull a self driving car that can consistently beat Waymo out of their back pocket (self driving drone? for sure! entirely different problem plus incentive structures). they simply do not have the capability or research talent or resource pipelines to build a massively next generation CPU. sure, you can imagine a world where the NSA has built a secret underground fab and have 10000 hardware engineers who have been wiped from the internet locked away. but in practice this is very expensive and difficult and just not the way the US government does things. there was no pressing reason for them to have tried to build this kind of technology on their own, and it very much fits directly with public company's capabilities. the US government doesn't have a secret next generation AWS.... they just use AWS. it's likely the NSA has hardened GovCloud with methods that aren't publicly disclosed, but it's still AWS. the US government is not magical and it's not prescient. it utilizes the resources available to it.
large language models are 6 year old technology. there was little indication they would work before that. the US federal government did not then and does not now have a massive stable of AI researchers . there was no flow from top ML PhD programs to the federal gov, or even of them quietly disappearing or going to work for small no name places that could be a cover story. they just all went to google and facebook and then openai and anthropic. the talent is clearly visible. the compute and power are all clearly visible. the timelines are short enough there's been little reason for the government to take the situation seriously. the political environment has been chaotic enough it's very unlikely there has been a consistent driving visionary behind the scenes who actually understand AI progress and saw this coming.
the idea that the NSA has a post-frontier model in a box somewhere would require an entirely different world than the one we're living in. it's not possible to *prove* that they don't, but just because you have an intuition that the US government is powerful doesn't mean you should actually ascribe arbitrary capabilities to them.
@DanSimermanHave you considered that the entire purpose of DARPA is to be at least 2 decades ahead of civilian technology. You really think the US Government can’t defend itself against an LLM.