There's 0 chance of that. You can maybe say that for things like material science, nuclear stuff, weird physics, and so on (basically anything relating to making big booms, delivering big booms, or ensuring others can't make big booms). But having LLMs as we understand them now in the 80s would be impossible. They simply didn't have the compute necessary. The entire world combined didn't have it.

For reference, a single 4090 GPU has more FP8 flops than the top supercomputer in 2007. A 4x 4090 computer (something you can buy today for ~10k) would be better than to top supercomputer in 2010 [1]. There's a reason deep learning only started to really work in the past few decades. We had the "theory" for a while, but no compute to actually put it in practice. And the current models are being trained on 10s to 100s of thousand of enterprise GPUs, that make the 4090 look like a toy.

[1] - https://timdettmers.com/2023/01/30/which-gpu-for-deep-learni...

I had research lab exposure to what the US military had in the 80's, the groups I saw were hyper focused on 3D visualizations in support of in-the-field strategy. Think wireframes superimposed over a live camera feed, with those wireframes being the horizon line and what are the items beyond their current range of view. A building wall is simply a wireframe, and the floors and every type of sensor they could get to feed into visualizations to see inside and past buildings, hills, any navigable area.

> I'll bet they had LLM or better in the 80's and the tech we have now is the consumer-grade version they seeded into industry in the 2020's.

They didn't have LLMs but they did have "AI" already (for a fair while by then). It wasn't much anything like what we have now really, but it did exist and by the current standards of that time period it was pretty much straight out of science fiction. (Imagine how shocked they'd be seeing what all we have now. "Supercomputers" in nearly every pocket, widespread broadband Internet, LLMs, etc, etc.) You're definitely right though in thinking that they had technologies far beyond what they told the public about. That's been the case since before my own lifetime at least, and absolutely certainly still true today.

the same military is using computers with Windows and Xbox controllers

and got upset when Anthropic didn't want to let them use their LLM

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.

I’ll take that bet