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convolvatrontoday at 3:33 PM1 replyview on HN

that's really unlikely. in the 80s the US military had several AI labs and was working with academia...I worked with some. the focus was nearly exlucsively on logic programming and 'expert systems', a path which failed miserably leading to an 'AI winter'.

somewhere around 1990, working at a Dod lab, I picked up on the 'neural network' craze and did a little work. it seemed interesting, but not that much different than using adaptive filters for signal processing. that seemed to be the general consensus, that there wasn't a lot of of interesting behavior or depth there. the number of weights and sizes of super computers at the time were a good 3-4 decimal orders of magnitude lower than what's being thrown today.

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.


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dwoldrichtoday at 4:00 PM

> 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.