"... it might be hard to attract talented AI engineers to live in, say, North Korea ..."

There are other ways to bring talent into North Korea:

"... Choi was abducted and taken to North Korea by the order of Kim Jong-il. While searching for Choi after her abduction, Shin was also abducted and taken to North Korea soon after."

"... In North Korea, Choi and Shin were remarried, at Kim's recommendation.[5] Kim had them make films together ..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choi_Eun-hee#Abduction_and_yea...

How much of a choice do they have? I can't imagine many of the top engineers in North Korea are allowed to leave

When most of your population is borderline starving the number of top engineers can be counted on very few hands in NK.

Still enough to build a nuclear arsenal. So that's probably enough to build AI talent

Their nuclear arsenal is built with Chinese and Russian brains, not NK's native technology.

That being said, North Korea has a fairly decent cyberespionage program from what I hear.

Koreans can become talented AI engineers.

The DPRK has a history of simply abducting people with the talents that the DPRK requires. A plausible (although unlikely) scenario is that the DPRK abducts a handful of AI experts and forces them to train Koreans in AI.

Alternatives are for Koreans to learn abroad or for Koreans to learn online.

I'm not saying that North Koreans cant be good engineers, I'm saying that it's going to be an uphill struggle for NK to compete for tech talent when US/Chinese companies have so much more of the capital required to build these models

The DPRK doesn't have to compete for tech talent in the same way most countries do, because other states probably won't be able to poach tech talent away from the DPRK.

And how much talent would the DPRK really need to do impactful work with GPT-3 (assuming that it really can be used for be used for nefarious purposes)?

Yes, as if in North Korea they had access to the Google Maps API or AWS or at least github just to mention a few, what you mention is a bad example. How about a less biased example?

What about North Koreans desperate to be part of the privileged elite? They can take courses and learn just like anyone else.

I’m genuinely curious how accessible that sort of material is to the average North Korean.