Looking at this from far away, with the Snowden revelations in mind I'd think it's not tinfoil hat territory to assume that some of the progress at OpenAI got achieved with some help from well ressourced folks in the USG/Three Letter Agencies.

I doubt it. Scraped tweets and reddit is already huge

I don’t think they helped them. Now, did they train off the same data sources? Well, since OpenAI isn’t saying what GPT-4 is trained on, and the NSA can hoover up all kinds of non-public data, it stands to reason they may both be doing something slightly shady with emails, texts, and the like.

Yeah, I've started wondering similar things about that too, like how far ahead is the NSA on this stuff? And how does that tie in to the recent policy of denying China semiconductors?

Perhaps history will show that the NSA made algorithmic breakthroughs a few years ago and realized what was coming, so political policy was crafted to stymie Chinese progress in this field, and what we're seeing in the public sphere from companies like openAI is a managed release of the technology into the public, openAI at least managing to independently discover the same breakthroughs that the NSA made a a few years ago.

You're seeing the government entity as separate from the corporate entity, but quite often in the US its the other way around. The government entity is a rather hollow shell, and the 'brains' of the operation is contracted out to the corporation. The government entity would almost cease to exist if the corporation under it magically disappeared.