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Nicolas Chaillan

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2024-03-11
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2024-03-11
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  1. “Term process, but it's up to the players, including the folks with the money and the investors, having a seat at the table. Analyze it, hopefully with AI. And then help our policymakers sort of create this stuff.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Do we forecast? Do we not forecast? Where we think it's going to land? And there are no solid answers to any of these questions because every six months it's going to be something new. And so how do you build policymaking on top of emerging tech areas? That is an art. And I mean, again, it's up to lawmakers and policymakers to figure this out, which is where then you end up with things like, for instance, executive orders rather than laws, right? It's very interesting how the policymaking apparatus works where you end up with 100 pages of executive order stuff that outlines generally some ideas and thoughts and questions. And I think there's going to be this leaning in and convergence that happens between industry and regulators and stuff because this stuff's moving, the tech is moving, policymakers are learning more. They learn more. They ask more questions. The tech industry moves this way. So it's an iterative long.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “You can list five, 10, 15. There's all these emerging tech areas that we follow now. And we've got world-leading domain experts that follow each emerging tech area. Because again, there's demand and support from downtown on those questions. Okay, so I listed, what, four, and then the fifth one is privacy, security regulation around social media, et cetera. So these five areas of technology now, there's a spotlight on them. To Martin's point, where it lands and ends up, that's purely a policymaker domain. Our job, though, that's tricky in many of these situations is that these are, by definition, emerging tech areas. I mean, 5G and semiconductors are scaled industries, but the rest of these industries are emergent industries. And emergent industries just having been in the industry, in startups, we don't know where this stuff's going to land. And so all of a sudden becomes really hard to understand who to talk to, who to believe.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Wow, I'm not sure I'm going to top that. And I do actually have to be careful in the sense that, again, sort of the big disclaimer I have to patch on this is CIA needs to, you know, we're not a policymaking shop. Our job is to support policymakers with very objective by the book analytic support on the questions that they're asking. What Martin, I think, just outlined is exactly the policymaking debate and discussion going on, is this idea of how do you regulate versus incentivize, right? Because I think the thing is that what happened with things like privacy and security and other things has impacted consumers and therefore it impacts lawmakers. And so we got pulled into Lean and now whatever's happening in that area, right, the issue around 5G was a big national security concern all of a sudden. Then all of a sudden now the Chips act in terms of semiconductors. Look at what happened in crypto and now AI. So I'm listing them because at CI we trend.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Mindset. You can't take this mindset of investing in this stuff as bad because it's asymmetric. You can't take the mindset of like this is inherently exponential. You can't take the mindset of this is core critical infrastructures because it's just very, very different. This is a new type of technology. as useful for us for doing good as it is for changing the threat environment, which I actually don't think it changes the threat environment a lot. And so I think that both the government and us in industry need to come together and acknowledge this is a new technology that's beneficial and then we're better learning about it than running away from it and we can't take these old lessons from the internet and somehow kind of wrote apply them because then we're going to miss the train. And so for me, this is kind of like the higher bit and the most important thing. And then a lot of the things you talked about are important, but they will kind of follow in due course.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Think that starts to help maybe Ease some of the friction in terms of, I don't know if whether it's making Faster making adoption a little easier, making it easier to kind of hack on stuff. So maybe I'll say something, then it would be great if you took us home, which is the issues you just talked about have been around for a very long time, and I don't think that's the hireder bit, right? Like, of course, we can make procurement better. Of course, we can make communication better. Of course, we can have better public-private partnership. I remember talking about this in the 2000s and the 90s, et cetera. Here's what I think is the most important. And you alluded to it before, and I think it's so important, which is the internet caught the US flat-footed a bit. There was this notion of asymmetry. It ended up having exponential effects because there was so much connectivity. And so when it came out, it took us a while to come to grips with it. And what I fear, my biggest fear is with AI, people are fighting the last war and it's to our detriment, which is a lot of things people are concerned about with AI were really Internet things. And we've kind of gotten on top of. So you can't take that.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Engagement with the technology industry, which happens out in the open, right? The idea of carrying a business card and being present and being on podcasts, these are all culturally new things for the agency to deal with. So we ourselves are going through this huge, huge transformation dealing with tech. How do we actually change the thinking in this new world? And then the AI stuff on top of it, which then is another layer of complexity in terms of changing how we operate, what we do in the discipline. It's a very interesting, exciting, but also somewhat confusing and transformational time for the agency.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “However, the other aspect of the thing is that applying tech, what is the big change in tech that we've seen over the past couple of decades? Scale. And so this idea of the individual versus scale is a cultural thing that we're trying to rationalize, right? Is applying enterprise large-scale tech to an organization that teaches individuals to basically have agency to go do things. So that's a very interesting one. The short term versus long-term, which is the idea of us being an agency that's ready to go at a moment's notice, which the agency does incredibly well. But again, to do large-scale enterprise-wide technology transformations and things takes time, it's the open versus sort of clandestine, which is as an agency are folks trained to be out there in public. And Director Burns has made this a big priority in terms of engagement with the outside world.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Case officers, and we operate in, right? We're publicly talk about what we call ubiquitous technical surveillance, right? UTS, video cameras, biometrics, et cetera. So we as a spy agency hate tech when it's applied against us, but we also wield it, right? So it's that aspect. The other interesting cultural thing agency that's been fascinating is the power of the individual, which is we train individuals to go do heroic efforts and things, which that's our job, right? That's the agency's job is to go into foreign countries and spy. However, the tech aspects of, there's no other way of putting it.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Issue is that the security needs and requirements to run the stuff on the high side is very expensive. And for commercial vendors to provide and go through that process is expensive and an investment. And so we have to create incentive structures to be able to bring them in. And so it's not simply we can will it into existence, but it's a systemic problem that we're trying to attack and hack away at. There's certain things that have been breakthroughs inside the agency over the past year and a half, I can say. probably can't tell you what those are, but we've made huge, huge progress in rethinking in other ways there. And as an agency, there's a number of cultural shifts that we're going through internally, right? So first is the human.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “So there are absolutely certain things that we need to build and write inside the agency that's very specific. It's also our competitive advantage, right, which is we're not going to be buying this stuff that's readily available for everyone. We have our secret sauce. We build it. It's our competitive advantage. However, what we don't do sometimes is analyze that we take that too far, which is there's stuff that's readily available outside from commercial land that we don't think about buying, deploying, and implementing at scale. And in the past year and a half, we have actually spent a lot of, I've personally spent a lot of time focusing on what I call commercial first, right? Is this idea that we need to be rethinking our strategy, that if something is available on the outside, how we bring it in? However, we have procurement processes, we have ATO processes, we have security processes that don't lend themselves well for rapid acquisition and pieces. So we're trying to hack away at those. On top of it, the other...”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “So, this is a slightly different topic this idea of what are we doing in government to do a better job of working with industry, right? A large portion of this job that I have is this idea, this new idea of, well, it's American dynamism. It's this idea of Silicon Valley leaning in and the government having to lean in together for us to meet in the middle to be a better supplier and a great customer. In my role at the agency, one of the big areas of focus for us is how do we become a dramatically different customer? I spent two and a half years at the Pentagon, which was its own gigantic problem in terms of that sort of software defined warfare ideas came. And in all honesty, we don't do a great job in certain things where we could be world-class or better. And we are working really, really hard to change that. So, for instance, as we point out inside many cases, there is no ready app store for spy software.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yeah, just the question is will the private market solve the problems needed for things like global defense or like national security and stuff like that and just historically the government has played a role in innovation, in training, I mean, think about like nuclear engineers like a lot of this actually came up from government programs.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Academia ends up with these large compute places to be able to rival commercial. And at the same time, the availability of hardware commoditization and other pieces will get to a point where we'll be able to run all kinds of interesting algorithms at scale with really cheap readily available hardware. So that's a sort of techno-optimist aspect of it, which is, as I say, life finds a way, which there's demand for it, people will supply it.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Yeah, I mean, so here's the other side of the argument, which is the very dynamics that have led us to this point of creating these algorithms and these systems, these breakthroughs. There's also hundreds of companies that you and other VCs are funding hacking away at the problem to make these things available, right? There's huge amounts of work going on in AI-specific chipsets, both on the training side and the inferencing side, a whole bunch of algorithmic changes that are going to happen that refactor these algorithms to do better job in terms of scaling and being able to shrink them without a dramatic loss of performance. So again, we're such in the early stages in innings of this game that we don't know what the next five years is going to bring. But for sure, you've got thousands of really, really smart people hacking away at the problem that I think will come to some medium where, yes, hopefully the government or maybe the government funds or”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “It does seem like that, maybe there was a shift at some point, too. Maybe it was the internet. I'm not sure where, like, in the super computer days, yes, you bought a system from IBM or SGI or Crane. But that was a hardware system Right, running some very specialized software. But today, yes, everything comes out of these huge companies that have access to all the data and all the computing power. And like, yeah, I don't know if that affected the power shift, but do you sense a way to bridge it?”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Kind of doing the opposite, where back in the 90s was exactly what you said. I mean, I went to like northern Arizona University, small mountain school, and we had ASCII programs where they would come out and invest in us. And I just feel that now, even though we have this new technology, it's very powerful and we are the leader and it came from the United States. Instead, we're kind of pulling back from it. And so I do think that this is a moment of, I think the U.S. has to kind of take pause and understand if are we undergoing a doctrine change where when new technologies come, we run away from it instead of towards it. you know, I think it's a real quandary.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “So, the thing that brought me into the intelligence community is I was doing computational physics on supercomputers at a national lab in the weapons program when 9-11 happened, right? And they're like, you have all the clearances, you need to move to this kind of new area. And they moved me to the intelligence community and I learned a bunch of stuff that way. I will say the work that we did on those supercomputers, the government was the best. It created entire new disciplines of scientists and career professionals in universities. It leaned totally into this. And that's why we maintained a leadership position in the world through that in compute. And we still do. I do think that it's a risk that we don't take the same attitude. Listen, I'm a VC here and I'm saying I don't think the private market will solve everything. I do believe in public-private partnerships. I do believe in institutions. I do believe that the government has a big role to play here. But I think that role to play is investing heavily in people and tech and careers and reaching out. And my fear is that they're...”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Well, we should. I think there needs to be this model it has to come out from away from just corporate organizations doing this to, and we're part of government, so it's a different thing. But the question is whether this needs to get sort of opened up in a bigger way.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “I'll take a shot at that because it's something that we're, well, I think the US government is thinking about this writ large is when you go talk to universities right now, one point they make is they don't have the compute power to be able to rival. Microsoft and OpenAI and these companies, which is mind boggling, right? Because to your point, the supercomputer systems and everything when I was at Cornell, you remember we had a supercomputing site on campus with money that the government had put in place to have these supercomputing centers, right? Illinois had one Cornell, et cetera. And we don't have that equivalent now. So now the National Science Foundation, I think some of the money that the government's allocated, I'm assuming is going towards building these large scale or not.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “And this is a whole new level of paranoia that you need to have working at a spy agency. It's one thing for your program to not run or some e-commerce customer having a bug or something. These issues are still, again, also really, really important for us.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Great. I have that information. I just don't have the compute cycles to be able to do anything with it, right? Or modify it or change it. So you're totally right. It will help it with verification. It'll help with training, testing, help with all that stuff. That's fine.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “No, absolutely. Anybody's ability to do something with that information is limited because it's not just the numbers. You have to have the expertise you need to compute. You need all the other pieces there.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Come out of SDI or come out of KSR, whatever it is, we'd buy one of everything. But we only got what the vendors created. And something that I do think about, it'd be great to hear your perspective, Nan, which is it's one thing to open source weights and biases. That's one thing. But these are the largest compute projects that mankind has ever done before. Like we've never done anything close to this. And so even if the weights and biases are open source, I don't know how much you can modify it, right? So it almost feels like we're going back to this old mainframe day where it's great to have it and you can operationalize it, but you're not going to have the same level of flexibility as you have with like traditional software. At least this would be my...”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. Here's a bit of a historical perspective on this, which is similar to what I touched on before, which is, in my experience, the government and intelligence agencies have to solve problems that market forces don't really solve for. In order to do that, there has to be some sort of flexibility programmability and open source has always been a key component of this, right? I mean, quite famously, SE Linux came out of the NSA, and they used Linux to do it because they required. And there's been a number of chaining to algorithms like crypto, right? I don't remember the details, but remember the NSA was like, oh, quadratic linear programming will break this, so go ahead and do this kind of change in the algorithm, then it's better. I mean, so these are types of things that have been coming out of intelligence for quite a while. Now, I remember 20 years ago when I was in the depths working on one of these problems, and there's an old timer there, and he goes to me, he's like, man, here's a tech old timer. He's like, it's so great you have this open source because we can work with it. He says, I remember in the time when all we would get was supercomputers and they would come out of IBM or.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “My pristine, handcrafted sort of maiden bespoke fashion thing, that's where the availability of these algorithms becomes really interesting. However, it has the opposite problem of it doesn't have the imprimatur and the stamp of a large company that has the experience building large software systems and training and verification other pieces. So we then have to sort of know and understand the stuff ourselves and do all that work. So I think that's a trade-off that we're dealing with.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “So you're getting these LLAs with these different lineages and different vintages and different data, et cetera. And each of these systems are going to behave very differently over time, right? Now, the question is the going big problem of like, well, everybody's going to train on the whole internet, so everything's just going to look the same, right? This versus that. But I think there's a second question that we're having to do is, and this is where the open source question comes in, is the ability to start training with your own data. And the question becomes, do I take a base algorithm or system that somebody has built? That, by the way, has ingested the entire internet, which both good and garbage that has been ingested in. And now I use that as a base platform. And it may have a certain set of biases that it brought along with the garbage and cesspool that the internet is. And all of a sudden now I'm using that as my base.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “So, the thing we're challenged with on just this whole landscape right now is each of the companies is offering a particular LLM. And to me, it's turning into sort of like different types of line or different varietals. And I'm not a wine snobber or know why that well, but I'm imagining it has something, the lineage and the data, exquisite data. This one was grown in the hills of Normandy. And this one comes from”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “And then, in terms of you want to adopt something, right? So there's commercial technology not up to par, but you need to be able to remake in your own image and then get something that's actually functional for you.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Before we get into policy specifically, is there a sense where the advent of open source and just the general acceptance of open source now, especially in AI and also other emerging techs? Does that ease the adoption to”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Surfaced to the user's face. And if they aren't, we have to train people to start thinking about when the system punches out a number. How do you make a decision on a probability? So I think that that's the big difference between before and now that we're having to retrain everybody and why it's become a policy issue all of a sudden. It's because policymakers now have a knob where we now have to decide explicitly this or that. So to me, it's actually we're in a kind of the same world, but just more in an explicit world.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “We have lines and lines and millions of lines of code, but it has those if statements in there. Now, it's interesting because what that means is we've implicitly taken human decisions that a programmer or a policymaker made and encoded into code. Now with this new sort of AI-based systems, both the previous sort of supervised learning and unsupervised, and now with these newer algorithms, these are still probabilistic algorithms. Except now the probabilities actually stare you in the face in a way that previous systems didn't push, right? So previous application systems never came up with said, do you want the 49%, the 69% answer? And now you decide whether 69 is high enough or not, right? Basically, we would encode it and say, great, there's an arbitrary number 50, and anything above versus below. Now why this is becoming such a debate is because the probabilities are now so...”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “It's this idea of going across that distribution curve and starting to understand. One other piece that's been sort of right in the middle of this whole thing is the whole policymaking debate inside. One key point I wanted to make was even in this analytic function, the work that each of us do has encoded in it the policies and outlines of what we have to do as part of a job function. I call this code as law, which is that when you look at the applications that you probably use at the agency and that we use there, we encode all of those rules and regulations inside of it. And I call this the thresholding problem to some extent, which is inside a line of code in our application, there is something that says if probability of x happens beyond this, then do this versus that.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “But yeah, basically this idea of how do you actually take something that's on a hardware carbon push it onto a software curve? How do you do this program reprogramming, et cetera? And so the question we've been asking inside is what does software defined intelligence look like? Right. So what.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “They are. Then what the market is striving for. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've been a huge software-defined networking fan for a very long time. But I stole it for a paper that I co-wrote with General Shanahan called Soft-Refine Warfare.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Was before it was done and hard was too tough to program. Like, honestly, the insight for that work all came from my time working with the intelligence agencies. We had to build a network that had to deal with certain things. And I actually came from the computing side of the world. I'm like, these things aren't programmable. And to do what we need to do here, I have to program them because Cisco just doesn't know what we need to do. So there's also a flip side. Everything you say, I totally agree. It takes a long time to be adopted. But also your requirements and needs are a bit different than what the market is striving for. Yeah, yeah.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “So, I experienced when I was in the intelligence community something very similar but modestly different, which is the following, I was an ops and we would have missions and stuff to do and they would have very specific requirements and the piece of technology that came from the private sector just were not suited. And in fact, little known story, so my PhD work was in software-defined networking.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “And so by the time something hits that threshold of getting into the presidential daily brief, you can imagine the level of scrutiny and analysis and focus that our analysts put into this work. So it's funny because like the excitement and hype about this technology versus us absorbing it and making it battle ready is a long, long distance. And so hopefully portraying or representing that side of the equation, which doesn't happen rapidly, right? It takes a long time for folks in their own disciplines and life and careers to understand what's the actual impact. The absorption of this technology does take a long time. And for it to disrupt a particular individual or an individual discipline.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “One interesting thing for me has been having spent 25 years in the valley, done a bunch of startups and now being on the government side is a lot of the tech discussion around this is about the possibilities and all the great stuff on the creation side, which is awesome. Innovation, invention, getting great people to do awesome stuff. But you have to flip over to the buy side of technology. This is my second run. Pentagon was two and a half years now at CIA of being on the buy side of technology and seeing all the stuff happening. I just actually took a red eye in from California and they're like, over there, it's all about possibilities. And here it's about how do we take the job, the function that we have to operate in with all the constraints and things, which are, by the way, not constraints that are artificially imposed. I mean, the CTO office at the agency right next door is where the PDB gets made for the president.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “That was a great explanation, and I think it's exactly right. So, imagine you're an analyst, and imagine if you get paired up with some person that's been in the agency for like 40 years. So this person doesn't know new technology. It just knows what everybody's done a whole bunch. Is that the entire perspective? Of course not. Like you have to evolve, but it's a very important perspective. So LLMs are very good at being that old person. They're very good at being like, well, this is how we've done it in the past. Here's a recommendation. But that's why we have people is to make a decision. Like, do I want to do something new, something that's in the tail, or do I want to listen to this person that's been around for a very long time? So it's a very concrete kind of mental bookend for doing things, but the majority of the value, which is the new stuff, will still remain with the person.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Case and what's the role of the analyst? The role of the analyst is to have this holistic piece of thinking through probabilities. I mean, it's kind of what an AI program would do to some extent if you start modulating where on the sort of distribution you want to go.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “Yeah, and I break it up into the first pieces does this technology replace the analyst. The second piece that Martin talked about is the co-pilot model, which is I do my work and I have a little wing person that helps me with all the routine stuff or scaling, but it's exactly his point, which is it's not the creation of new information from old information. Like human beings uniquely create new things, new information, it's unclear whether these systems actually produce new information or new thought. It's just finding it or routinizing it. The third one is what I call this sort of crazy drunk friend problem, which is the hallucinating, which has a role in some disciplines, right? Making new art, poetry, and in the analyst function, it's this point of finding that point on the distribution. Because if the average policymaker could think through the average user”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “These are the problems the intelligence agency is particularly good at. And so I think we can believe that there's a world where every analyst will have strapped on an LLM that'll help them with the routine stuff. But like so much of the job is tail reasoning, reasoning in the tail that this is not going to remove the humans. And by the way, this is just the intelligence community. I think this is most work, but I think it's particularly acute in the intelligence.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “Well, I think we can say something relatively specific on this, and then there's a bunch of stuff we don't know. But here's the thing that's relatively specific. So the way that these large language models in particular work is they get a whole bunch of data, and then they basically have a distribution of how come the data was represented. That's what they do, right? They do basically what's called kernel smoothing over positional embeddings, which is just like averaging a bunch of words. So it averages a bunch of words. And then for any time that you ask it a question, it kind of gives you like the most common outcome. So what does this mean? This means for mean things you want to do for the average thing you want to do, it would be very good at getting you an answer. So for any kind of standard rote thing you want to do, it's good to give you an answer. The problem is, is if you want to do something in the tail or in something that's new or an exception, it doesn't know how to do that. There's no mechanism within it that will do that. And so much of intelligence work, I would argue, is actually in the tail, right? I mean, it's like.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “That's how people took the kids to Disney World and you go on the Epcot ride, which was the ride of the future. It was from the 1950s or 60s, imagining what the world would be like in 2024. And it's like a handheld phone with a video monitored on it. Like, okay, so it's one of these things, which is it's really hard to see where this stuff is going.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Very far away from knowing where this is going to go. So it's really hard for them to imagine this prototype thing that's like still playing around. How's it going to impact or rethink my job? So this is where we're pushing and experimenting and encouraging everyone, try stuff, learn stuff, get up the experience curve. But we're not going to settle on an answer because that's not going to just appear off of that.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “We have it in production in the open source team, so those easy use cases business automation, other pieces. We're experimenting, we're trying, we're doing stuff. Now, the co-pilot piece, the way I view it is typically people jump immediately to the hardest of hard problems and say, we're just going to go replace this. We're going to go do this, that. What we're challenging everyone to do inside the agency, though, is it's one thing to like look at the low-hanging fruit, get that stuff automated, get the value. The thing that's most interesting though is we're challenging folks to say stop thinking about automating getting a 10%, 20%, 30% on your job. Tell me in five to ten years how you're going to reimagine your job. Now, here's where things get tricky because many of the people who are challenged to reimagine their job are looking at this technology and learning it, right?”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “Could be a porch with rocking chairs and us sitting around talking about the early days of the internet. We could not have possibly imagined the stuff that's happened over the past years. So at the agency what we're doing is saying great. There's a whole bunch of these basic use cases that are just, there's no question the stuff can get applied. And by the way, we're all in on it, right? So I didn't ever wanted to give the impression that this is something that we're slow rolling it or thinking it. But to Martine's point, the applications on a per-use basis, we have to think them through. This is not peanut butter that you can just spread everywhere and you get goodness everywhere with no thinking. So for instance, we're public with the fact that we actually have LLMs in production at the agency.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “Yeah, and absolutely brilliant point is this idea of the accrual of the probabilities times probabilities probabilities, which gets to the hallucination stuff, et cetera. When it comes to my 11-year-old drawing unicorns, that's a feature not a bug. No problem. No problem. Awesome. Who stayed away? That's awesome. That's great. If playing games, doing all kinds of crazy, like that's amazing. When it comes to analytic capabilities, when it comes to operations, we cannot have this level of uncertainty in not knowing and explainability. I mean, the piece that's sort of interesting is I think that we're in such these sort of early stages of this game, right? So everything we're talking about here is like we were in 1995. I showed him two years ago. This thing just happened. And we were just talking before this. Like, all of us, old three, old fogies here sitting around the porch. This very well.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Of distribution, like, and by the way, out of distribution means it's not commonly represented in the training set, then that error is going to accrue and it tends to accrue exponentially provably, right? And so I think right now we view these as new tools that you use side by side, but they don't become their own separate kind of entity.”

    2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source