YouSaid · the spoken record

Nicolas Chaillan

lines on the record: 62
first: 2024-03-11
most recent: 2024-03-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“The first answer to your question is does it allow for personalization or does it allow for kind of anything specific? I think that it doesn't create any imbalance between two opposing sides. So the second answer to that is I think we're pretty clear about even the individual limits of, let's say, LLMs right now, which is very, very good for a few use cases. They're very, very good for, like you ask one question, they give you one response. And if that question is in the corporate data, it'll give you a good response. The problem is the question is out of the corpus of the training data, like you don't really know if the response is good or not. Which is fine if you're just asking one question because most humans will be able to check that, right? So it's very good if you have like a co-pilot for an analyst and you help them with their job. The thing that we've not seen any evidence of is agentic behavior. My agentic behavior means like you ask one question, then you step away and you go get a coffee and it does its own thing. And the reason is if it generates anything”
2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How close are we actually? I mean, Maybe going back to the early days of talking about big data, like. Personalized something will be, or how easy it's going to be to sort of, if I mean. Are we still a ways away from very much automating maybe in a CIA analyst? So I think we're now understanding the kind of power and limits of this technology. I think there's a very important topic for us, maybe prediction to make, which is, will this change the existing equilibrium that is now an intelligence between kind of like offense and defense, et cetera? My deep belief is exactly what Nan says, which is like it doesn't change the equilibrium in the sense that there's going to be more killing for offenses, there's going to be more tolling for defense. This is no asymmetric superpower, which, by the way, is very, very different than the internet. And this is why this is such a bad analog. The internet was asymmetric, which is like the more capabilities you had with the internet, the more vulnerable you were, which is why when we were working on the terrorist threat, we're like, we're the most vulnerable nation in the world. And like many of the people that we were focused on didn't even have laptops. It's nothing like that. AI is something that anybody can use. It doesn't change some fundamental equilibrium in an asymmetric way.”
2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In some sense, and starts tailoring the stuff and gets deeper and deeper and deeper over time, right? This is the stuff you've been driving to. Now, that has a evil twin problem to it that I've been spending time on thinking about just as it relates to our work is what I call the sort of rabbit holing problem, which is the very thing that makes these products and technologies so effective, which is learning about you and knowing these algorithms are built to please you. They want to make you happy. Well, it can then also, unfortunately, take the things that you as an analyst are weakest at, or it's your weak knee or get into your head and start rabbit holding you down this thing, which amplifies your biases. So we've got to be very careful, very smart about where we apply it, when and how modulo all these particular things that are out.”
2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Underlying AI is the promise and excitement always is the pattern. The ability to discover patterns in large amounts of data that typically humans can't see. What's different now in the older days of when we were doing big data analytics and things, I call this the pull model versus the push model, which is the analyst had to come up with creative stuff to think about first and say, I'm going to put a query in to go find the information. The problem is the conceptual boundary of an analyst to hit the query that hits the data, it was like spear phishing, right? You're like going in and trying to get this one analytic idea out of this massive data. What's beautiful about this tech is now this stuff can actually push stuff, right? You can almost invert the process where a lot of the stuff gets pushed to you because it starts to understand what you're looking for.”
2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and I'll just compliment what Martine said. Really, when you look at the two big functions that we have as an agency, right? We've got the operational side and we've got the analytics side. And of course, those are composed to different things. But those are really broadly the two big functions. So what Martin absolutely nailed is the operational side of it, it's spy versus spy, it's cat and mouse, it's all the usual stuff, right? The democratization of this stuff and the availability we know is going to drive each one of our competitors to be driving this up. We're going to be aware of that. We're going to drive our own stuff up. So there's this aspect of we don't know where this is going to go, but it's definitely not pulling back. This is where the stops are off. However, the thing we've always got to keep, at least we keep in mind, we're a human intelligence.”
2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That if a computer generates something, the ability to kind of fingerprint that isn't that difficult. Not that hard, right? So I actually think it becomes much, much easier to detect if people are using AI and tooling actually is the reality. But that also means that we can't use them as tools and then we've got to go much more to the fundamentals. So in this kind of weird irony, like we've got this set of new tools that allows anybody to sound like anybody or be anybody, and that's going to be heavily, heavily used around the world. But like for those that are sufficiently sophisticated, it's going to be quite possible to detect them. And I think that in some ways this is kind of this nice cover in chaos for what our agencies and many agencies are very good at, which is kind of much more human focused, less than core technical approach to these intelligence problems.”
2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“AI has been around for a very long time. And I will say that even when I was part of the intelligence community 20 years ago, we talked a lot about if you have all of this information, how do you kind of detect signal? A lot of this was like very significant big data processing. And a lot of the more kind of advanced notions actually came out of the intelligence community. I mean, a lot of what the intelligence community deals with is things like entropy and covert comms, et cetera. A lot of these ideas are just fundamentally tied with AI. And so I just think there's a longstanding history. What's interesting to ask is how does this kind of new generative AI world impact the intelligence agency or intelligence in general? And one idea is like, well, okay, so we can now make anybody be anybody and sound like anybody and look like anybody. And oh, that could be a huge problem because now deepfakes can be a problem. And I'll tell you my conclusion in a lot of this is it actually turns out”
2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very focused on the here and now, which is there's a crisis, and we jump on it. And the CTO function really gives us the luxury a little bit of looking a little bit out rather than focus sort of inward. And the third thing is a little more external versus internal. So engaging with the outside world, those are kind of the big dimensions there.”
2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of what Amy Ziegart calls spytainment to what we actually do. And so this pivot in terms of rethinking the agency's focus on technology, there were three things that happened. One is we created the China Mission Center, which is how we actually focus on threats and opportunities. T2MC, which is transnational and technology mission center, and this weird thing called a CTO. And we're a 76-year-old spy agency. So we've been doing technology for a long, long, long, long time. But technology has been somewhat latent. What happened is with this focus on tech, we basically needed to focus on three different things that I think were different from what we were doing before. Number one is we are as an agency fairly vertically focused. So we have five directorates that focus on five things that sort of come together in the mission centers. So the idea of the CTO is really to go horizontal versus vertical. The second thing is we as an agency are”
2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So there are really two stories here. One is the agency needing a CTO and kind of what created that. And then my own journey to it. It all starts with Director Burns taking over the agency, beginning of the administration. And he, just like any great business leader, sat down and did a business review, which is what business are we in? What are the big threats? And the other pieces. And the conclusion was actually fairly interesting and not a surprise was that we had a pivot from CT, which had been the big sort of focus for the agency for a couple of decades, to great power competition. And then the interesting unusual sort of thing was this big amorphous thing called technology. There was huge interest, obviously, from policymakers in technology that we needed to start looking into and build policymaking around. And I think it might be helpful to the listeners to understand kind of what CIA actually does, because I had to actually learn a lot about the agency when I came on board.”
2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Artificial intelligence has taken this world by storm. I mean, just think about it here in 2024, anyone with an internet connection and a few minutes to spare can literally spin up a Disney avatar of themselves, translate a foreign podcast into their native language, and even get help in writing their vows. But artificial intelligence is not just impacting the creative spheres. In fact, you'll be hard-pressed to identify an industry that's not touched by this technology. The defense of our country is no exception. In today's episode, originally recorded in the heart of Washington, D.C. back in January during A16Z's American Dynamism Summit, A16Z general partner Martin Casado, and A16Z Enterprise Editor Derek Harris, are joined by first ever CTO of the CIA. Yes, that is the central intelligence agency. We're joined by CTO”
2024-03-11 · a16z Podcast · Intelligence in the Age of AI with new CTO of the CIA · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're a human intelligence operation. We can now make anybody be anybody and sound like anybody and look like anybody. 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. This is no like asymmetric superpower, which by the way is very, very different than the internet. It's because policymakers now have a knob where we now have to decide explicitly this or that. These are the largest compute projects that mankind has ever done before. Like we've never done anything close to this. 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