I am not saying this as a political insider. I’m saying “consider other hypotheses” and “avoid the base rate fallacy”. Here, let me generate another hypothesis:
“It’s been a decades long truism: NSA is drowning in data, but can’t to turn it into intelligence. LLMs are the magic solution NSA’s dreamt for for decades. But the only licensed classified LLM provider is stymieing progress because of the inclusion of domestic surveillance data. NSA has recently gained clout at the Pentagon: the success of Maduro, and Iran’s top 40 military leaders killed the first day of the war, were only possible because of NSA and cell phones. NSA’s newfound opportunities to lobby the Pentagon about this roadblock at the highest level due close collaborations for recent military actions is what lit this fire.”
There you go. Somewhat plausible sounding. I think you could generate scores of other somewhat plausible sounding hypotheses like this. Therefore, your prior for any particular somewhat plausible hypothesis should be small.
Are you familiar the legal phrases “in evidence” and “not in evidence”, as in “Objection! Question assume facts not in evidence!” or “Your honor, I move Exhibit A be admitted in evidence” or “You, the jury, may only consider the the testimony that has been admitted in evidence”? When you object to say something is “not in evidence”, you’re not saying evidence for it doesn’t exist—you’re saying “You just started relying on a premise we haven’t agreed to yet”. That term of art might be confusing and a reason to avoid saying “not in evidence”, but I didn’t get the sense the article understood that sense of the phrase.