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by ofalkaed·3y ago·view on hn ↗
I am guessing that professor was talking about the project which was looking for signs of other countries developing AI by monitoring internet traffic. If memory serves it was a fairly simple setup, just watching for traffic which consumed data like a person would but much faster than a person could. Don't remember the details but the information about it was released 20 some years ago, perhaps someone else remembers more about it.

Think it is safe to say that there are secret government projects on AI and those who know about them are staying silent to avoid treason charges. To find information about big projects on AI you can look at the various think tank websites, they generally have good information but tend towards the theoretical.

1 comments
Plenty of “secret” projects that are not actually secret for whatever reason and require no one breaching US national security regulations. Beyond that, without people even needing to say specifically what they working on, how it works, etc — you can tell just by the way for example Demis Hassabis and Ilya Sutskever both talk that they’re both hyper focused on finding one of the many paths to AGIs.

Also, agree that if such a monitoring system did exist back then was likely combination network velocity and honey pots - and if need, tracing traffic to identify and breach the originating system to understand the source of the behavior.

So projects which are actually not secret. DARPA and the like maintain lists of such projects on their websites[0] and probably also have lists of past projects somewhere. Only one currently active and disclosed AI project but I am sure they have had many others. And the various private think tank/pure research organization websites would be good to dig through, the bulk of this stuff might as well be secret consider how little anyone outside of the respective fields pay attention to it, looks like The Max Planck Institute has a department for intelligent systems [1].

0: https://www.darpa.mil/work-with-us/what-is-our-current-inves...

1: https://is.mpg.de/

Thanks, familiar with both the organizations, but possible others are not. If I had to make a guess if there was someone that would know, it would be Google’s former CEO:

- https://www.nscai.gov/commissioners/commissioner-bio/

They published a “final report” back in 2021:

- https://www.nscai.gov/2021-final-report/

Runner up would be Elon, given in my opinion, literally everything he does potentially has a national security spin.