Judging from how the DoD currently buys software, lots of money will be spent, many headlines will be written, awards will be handed out, and zero software will make it on to user workstations. End users will continue to use Excel for everything.
LanceH 17 minutes ago [-]
You almost had it until the end.
This will be used to generate even more powerpoint.
xpe 2 hours ago [-]
This isn’t software to be installed, though, is it? I am likely to think this will be a network service and therefore available via a browser. Connectivity may be better than you think.
seany 8 minutes ago [-]
I want to see the 3pao reports from deploying a large llm inside high or one of the iso partitions.
tonyhart7 14 hours ago [-]
200 mil is chump change for them, if prototype turned to be good then good for them but if its not then they are not worry
NHQ 3 hours ago [-]
That 200 Million is chump change only to people who think like chumps. In reality it is total waste, unproductive taxation that doubles as a counter balance to inflation, so doubly wasteful.
Chump together all the 100s of millions in waste year over year; the change to your chumping is not good change, its inflation and general impoverishment. Every penny of that 200 is a note in the bank of inflation and degradation.
JeremyNT 2 hours ago [-]
I believe this is implied in the parent's post.
We fund the military industrial complex to such a ludicrous degree that $200m can just disappear on bullshit contracts to cronies that go nowhere, and politicians don't bat an eye.
Nobody with power cares about the debt. They just keep borrowing money and handing it to the defense industry. This is one of only a handful of issues on which there is bipartisan agreement.
nilamo 1 hours ago [-]
Is all of that truely "waste", if it is being paid toward onshore companies? The money doesn't disappear, it gets redistributed to American companies.
Loudergood 8 minutes ago [-]
Broken Window Fallacy.
We could be spending it on things with a much higher return.
nilamo 2 minutes ago [-]
We're also talking about a governmental body. Generating the highest returns possible is a non-goal, and disregarding potentially useful things simply because they aren't the best possible use of funds is an easy way to just never do anything.
tonyhart7 3 hours ago [-]
US literally have 1 trillion military budget, if you think 200 mil its a waste for prototyping a next gen weapon then I would have a bad news for you
hansvm 2 hours ago [-]
It's something like $3 straight out of my pocket, and it's going to be a flop. That trillion dollar military budget has a lot of semi-unavoidable costs (pensions, salaries, etc), but it has a lot of bullshit like this too.
Your argument feels something like the heap paradox [0], "the budget is big, so this thing doesn't matter." The budget is made of things this size though, and all it takes to fix it is to start taking grains of sand out of the pile instead of stacking the pile higher.
does 30 cent matters to you??? because its not 3 dollar as a comparison but 30 cent is
imtringued 2 hours ago [-]
The cost of the Indian space program is roughly $1 per Indian. You're getting nothing for a third of the per capita cost of ISRO.
tonyhart7 2 hours ago [-]
Indian space program don't have armed forces that cover 80% entire planet
potato3732842 3 hours ago [-]
The nickels and dimes add the F up. Stop acting like they don't.
Save perhaps the most extreme "I spend 70% of my six figure income on rent because I want to live alone somewhere trendy" of household budgets this is true for literally everything from the smallest business in the smalles of small towns to the federal government.
tonyhart7 2 hours ago [-]
200 million is 0.02 percent of 1 trillion.
if you don't mind having 1 trillion military then you are not mind for 200 mill contract
potato3732842 2 hours ago [-]
Now add up all the other 2/20/200mil nickels and dimes across the DOD and what do you get?
The budget isn't all aircraft carriers and stealth bombers.
Maybe this is a good buy, maybe it's a bad buy. I don't know and I have no way of ever knowing. Just because the budget is big and the money is other peoples does not mean decision makers can be wishy washy about a hundred or two mil here and there. Everyone needs to care all the time. People like you and who share your "it's all pennies in the grand scheme" thought process at scale is the problem and why we're even having this discussion.
tonyhart7 2 hours ago [-]
My point is if you worry about waste taxpayer money, you would not have 1 trillion budget in the first place
this is not on top of the list of "waste" things to worry about
there are 20+ another reason and you pick this budget size its a weird hill to die on
potato3732842 2 hours ago [-]
That attitude is exactly how we got to a 1-trilling military budget in the first place.
tonyhart7 2 hours ago [-]
then you can start with project that eat the money most
chgs 2 hours ago [-]
You don’t know. You don’t have the time or knowledge to know.
You delegate that to people whose job it is to know.
But you keep delegating it to people who want to spend more.
FirmwareBurner 5 hours ago [-]
200 mil for a government contract is peanuts when you see how much taxpayer money governments loose via waste and corruption
raizer88 5 hours ago [-]
DOGE found basically nothing, and they worked with an axe trying to cut anything that come close to waste. So I am not sure where you see all this "waste and corruption".
jagermo 13 minutes ago [-]
I am convinced that you can find waste (probably not as much corruption) in every modern government. However, you need people to really dive into the processes, ask what and why those have been set up in the past (every rule has an origin story) and if they can be bundled or streamlined. Same with expenses, you need things like forensic accountants and time to understand things.
Doge wanted to take shortcuts and destroyed everything without having alternatives in place. They had hoped for short-term wins, and neither the workers there nor their boss has the attention span or the experience necessary to really understand and optimize processes, thus reducing waste.
acheong08 4 hours ago [-]
The goal of DOGE wasn't really to cut waste and corruption, just stuff they didn't like.
I'd argue that most of the military is waste and that America has no need to involve itself in wars. Something like Japan's SDF is sufficient and the extras could help with domestic infrastructure and public transport.
zimpenfish 5 hours ago [-]
> "waste and corruption"
Well, "waste" is often defined by conservatives as "anything spent on the poors and/or not given to the rich" - by that standard, yeah, there's a lot of "waste" in the US government.
transcriptase 4 hours ago [-]
What do you call it when the government pays for tens of thousands of annual licenses for software and only a few hundred are ever activated?
sorcerer-mar 3 hours ago [-]
Oh oh I know this one!
A rounding error!
FirmwareBurner 5 hours ago [-]
Bad faith argument. Why are you moving the discussion to DOGE when that's not what I was talking about?
You know the word "governments" that I used, means a lot more than the current TRUMP administration, right? Broaden your mind and PoV.
And also, how can you say with a straight face there isn't ongoing and never has been waste and corruption in any government? Again, think for yourself, ignore $CURRENT_EVENTS.
Look at your nation's government contracts that funnel taxpayer money to private pockets, then look at the output. Has there been value delivered proportional to the money spent at reasonable market rates? If not, then money was definitely wasted via incompetence, pocketed via corruption, or both.
This is so prevalent and is has become the norm everywhere for so long, that people are not even giving it a second thought anymore when it comes to government corruption, but somehow people want to be spoon-fed sources as if it's an unbelievable conspiracy theory.
nkrisc 4 hours ago [-]
Step up, throw down some numbers and sources.
FirmwareBurner 4 hours ago [-]
Let's do a thought exercise on your loaded question, considering government waste and corruption has been thoroughly covered by journalists since the invention of the free press and are a Google search away for you.
If I don't post sources, then you just accept government corruption doesn't exist, simply because nobody Googled for you?
If I do post sources, then what? Do you just suddenly change your mind and accept that stuff documented by the press it does exist?
Where, in good faith, were you hoping this conversation leads to when you were asking that?
It's not that there's any more fraud or waste in government than in private business, it's that it's less tolerated. I think the main reason for this misperception is that in the private sector, people pay a la carte for particular goods and services, while in the public sector, people pay for shared infrastructure even if they rarely use it themselves. So they are left with the feeling that they aren't getting their money's worth. But of course everyone benefits economically and socially from a stable and prosperous society, even if they can't put their finger on discrete services they use. The reality is that it simply costs a lot of money to maintain a large, modern society. Indeed, it actually costs more than we are paying here in the US, as evidenced by a growing debt that has been a bipartisan creation.
Believing in the mantra of waste, fraud and abuse is comforting, because it implies we could be getting all the same benefits for less money. But there really is no such thing as a free lunch.
potato3732842 3 hours ago [-]
>it's that it's less tolerated
You say that like it's a bad thing.
If my favorite restaurant decides to hire management by nepotism and product degrades I can just not go there.
You can't just not deal with the government so of course the standards ought to be higher.
Loughla 1 hours ago [-]
I didn't read that at all. It reads as a statement of fact, not a values judgement.
nkrisc 3 hours ago [-]
> If I do post sources, then what? Do you just suddenly change your mind and accept that stuff documented by the press it does exist?
Then I can read them, find similar sources, judge how much I trust them, and get a better idea of how much corruption and waste you are claiming exists.
While I am sure corruption and waste occurs, if it’s such a serious problem, there ought to be some evidence of it, direct or indirect.
What’s the alternative, I just accept your claim as fact? Or I “google” it until.. what? I find sources that support your claims?
Why should I believe you?
potato3732842 4 hours ago [-]
>If I do post sources, then what? Do you take your words back and admit that stuff documented by the press it is real?
If you post sources he will nitpick them to all hell. It's a classic bad faith argument move since it moves the discussion from one of the subject to one of source validity.
You usually see HN's resident handful of chronically linkposting jerks do it in the other direction (i.e. they make some insane statement and shit out cherry picked sources to back it up and it's up to everyone else to disprove them) but I suppose it could be used in this way too.
ethbr1 3 hours ago [-]
It's not bad faith when it's a legitimate request, which depends on the assertion.
If I say the sky is blue because of plane chemtrails, and you ask me for a source, that seems valid.
As with any large procurement system, there is moderate government waste in proportional terms, but one of the primary drivers of that waste is... anti-corruption systems operating as intended.
If you require 4 more forms than private sector, in order to be more sure there isn't corruption, then you've just imposed a cost that creates no value.
3 hours ago [-]
FirmwareBurner 3 hours ago [-]
>It's not bad faith when it's a legitimate request, which depends on the assertion.
No offence, but comparing asking for proof of corruption with proof of sky being blue of petrochemicals is a biased bad faith argument.
Asking for sources on corruption is more like asking for proof that the earth is round, which is definitely not a legitimate request, but more trolling masquerading like an innocent request and dodge scrutiny ("It's just a question bro, why r u mad lol").
Nothing wrong with asking such a question per-se, but that's something you can also google yourself due to countless occurrences from legitimate sources, hence why it's in bad faith to ask such a thing from others, and should be more strictly moderated as many here abuse this "sauce or gtfo" attitude in bad faith to discredit a pov without providing any arguments.
ethbr1 3 hours ago [-]
> Asking for sources on corruption
Existence of corruption isn't what you asserted.
>> how much taxpayer money governments loose via waste and corruption
That's the assertion you made -- waste and corruption at scale.
It's very much a reasonable question to ask for sources of how much there actually is.
Otherwise, people just post things on the internet insinuating that there's a huge (unspecified) amount.
Is it 1% of the budget? 5%? 25%? (Hint: it should be trivial for you, the claimant, to dig up a source. And it's close to one of those)
sjsdaiuasgdia 4 hours ago [-]
> Has there been value delivered proportional to the money spent at reasonable market rates? If not, then money was wasted via incompetence, pocketed via corruption, or both.
I'm going to unpack this a little. The second sentence does not actually follow from the question asked by the first sentence.
"Value" is a loaded term as used here. Not all value is economic. Most value has a degree of judgement involved. I may consider an outcome to be of high value where you see the outcome as low value, and vice versa.
"Reasonable market rates" is a peculiar term to use when speaking about things government does. There are things we want as a society that would not be adequately replaced by market solutions. Roads, for example.
Your answer to your question contains a logic error due to the language choices of the question. You disagree with the value versus the cost spent. That does not mean there was corruption. It just means you disagree. Other people can hold the opinion that the value was worth the cost.
I am not claiming that there is 0 corruption or waste ever in government. I am saying that there has been an effort to create a perception that there is far more corruption and waste than actually exists. That in turn is being used as justification for taking a wide variety of actions that would be hard to sell otherwise.
potato3732842 2 hours ago [-]
If value is such a nebulous term then that should make your job easier not harder because it lets you make comparisons to the "dysfunctional bigco" end of things.
The people you are arguing with think government is inefficient. They will be more than satisfied with an honest accounting that results in a conclusion that the government spends 5/10/20% more per result than private sector. Just having an actual number one can be confident in would be a huge step forward. But outside the most narrowly scoped of comparisons you people rebuff any such request for all but the most narrowly scoped accounting of expenditures with a bunch of hand waving which just makes it look like the problem is even worse.
ImPostingOnHN 1 hours ago [-]
> But outside the most narrowly scoped of comparisons you people rebuff any such request for all but the most narrowly scoped accounting of expenditures with a bunch of hand waving which just makes it look like the problem is even worse.
Setting aside whatever you mean by "you people", since we are all people, hopefully all on Team 'Make Things Better', and don't need to be divisive:
That seems to be what was requested here OF those making the claim that the accounting currently shows an unworkable level* of waste, requested BY those unconvinced of the claim.
* - Or perhaps I misread the magnitude being claimed. Could you clarify with a number, please?
FirmwareBurner 3 hours ago [-]
>"Value" is a loaded term as used here. Not all value is economic. Most value has a degree of judgement involved.
No it isn't. Most value CAN be objectively measured. I'll give you examples. US outspends all the other developed nations at healthcare, education, childcare and yet is behind them all in actual results with poor education, high infant motility and lower life expectancy. That's what waste and corruption does. Germany beats France at military spending and yet it's military is significantly less capable than France's. Waste and corruption. I could go on.
If someone tells you the value of their work can't be objectively measured, it's because they're dodging accountability and they have their hand in your pocket and wish to keep it that way.
>There are things we want as a society that would not be adequately replaced by market solutions. Roads, for example.
Fine, let's go with roads. If the "market price" price for road construction is 6 million/KM, but your government signed a deal with a contractor for a basic road at 20+ million per KM without any objective justification of why the price hike, then the taxpayers are being taken for a ride, called waste and corruption.
And I'm not even saying anything out of the ordinary. Such grifts are the norm in plenty of countries.
hidingfearful 3 hours ago [-]
> US outspends all the other developed nations at healthcare, education, childcare and yet is behind them all in actual results with poor education, high infant motility and lower life expectancy
US healthcare and childcare are private, not government. Likewise I suspect much of the education cost is private colleges/schools, not government.
You seem to be arguing that the private sector is less efficient and more corrupt than the public sector.
FirmwareBurner 4 minutes ago [-]
>US healthcare [...] are private, not government.
What's Medicare and Medicaid and why do they cost the government over 2 trillion?
On a per capital basis, even if you don't include private healthcare spending, the US stil spends more per capita on healthcare than the other developed countries.
Assuming the goal of said systems are the same between countries: but they're not.
In the US, the goal of the healthcare system is to produce profit. So the simpler explanation is that the healthcare system consumes more money and produces less healthcare because it spends more to produce profit.
FirmwareBurner 2 hours ago [-]
>Assuming the goal of said systems are the same between countries: but they're not.
And that's not corruption like I was saying?
sorcerer-mar 1 hours ago [-]
Uhh... no? Not in the traditional sense of the word, no. It's how we've decided to architect our system.
"Corruption" in this context typically refers to an element of dishonesty or theft and so on.
If you mean "corrupt" in the ethical sense, then sure, kind of?
FirmwareBurner 1 hours ago [-]
So the US taxpayers voluntarily asked their government to give them expensive and shitty health insurance instead of healthcare?
sorcerer-mar 19 minutes ago [-]
The US government doesn’t run the healthcare system, and yes voters consistently choose to keep it this way.
sjsdaiuasgdia 3 hours ago [-]
What would you say determines the market price of a kilometer of "basic road"?
the_sleaze_ 2 hours ago [-]
Your argument is that the government doesn't waste money?
Are you sure that's a defensible position?
Nearby a vacation spot there is a sand dune next to the road, and a carpenter spent an afternoon building a ramp over it so that his son could drive his mobility scooter onto the beach. The city tore it down, then took over 2 years to build it back, worse quality, at a final cost of over $40,000.
What do you make of this story, and how did DOGE even attempt a fix?
baxtr 8 hours ago [-]
> End users will continue to use Excel for everything.
Wait, I thought AI is killing all these jobs?!
sillystu04 6 hours ago [-]
Quite the opposite. AI will enable the creation of ever more macros and guide users to make even more elaborate pivot tables.
It's Excel's format guessing doing all the killing
medstrom 6 hours ago [-]
Sounds like it needs some AI.
867-5309 6 hours ago [-]
Clippy to the rescue
egorfine 6 hours ago [-]
Some of the government jobs could be killed by Excel alone but even that did not happen for decades.
FirmwareBurner 6 hours ago [-]
They keep saying this, but I'd like to see AI drink 6 beers before lunchtime.
jmsdnns 3 hours ago [-]
Where did TCP/IP come from? It's on every computer.
chgs 2 hours ago [-]
Nobody was given a contract to generate tcp/ip. And the protocol itself was mostly meaningless for decades.
xpe 3 hours ago [-]
Is this substantive engagement with the earlier comment? I’m not seeing it. You probably know the examples are different (long term R&D on a telecom protocol followed by government implementation and standards and industry adoption … versus fairly early-days access to a GenAI model tuned for defense contexts).
ajross 2 hours ago [-]
Generally a notable counter-example to a broad-brush point stands as "substantive engagement", yeah. Stating that the Pentagon buys software badly in the general case is a less specific and less engaged point than "ARPANET and IPv4 were DoD projects that ate the world".
If you want to argue that the examples are different, that's an extra point you need to bring to the table. You're not allowed to assume everyone just agrees with you.
xpe 2 hours ago [-]
Don’t you think the standard you mention is too low? I do.
The comment didn’t advance the conversation. It was a relatively shallow level of engagement; something I’d expect to see in a silly Reddit back and forth. We deserve better here.
And to your point: my comment explained my point: “long term R&D on a telecom protocol followed by government implementation and standards and industry adoption versus…”.
Of course I don’t assume everyone agrees with me. (You don’t really think I do, do you?) But I want people to put a certain level effort to reach a quality bar. My problem perhaps is that people don’t want to put in sufficient effort. Or perhaps as a community we are not setting the bar high enough. This level of thinking is attainable here; we just need to set the bar and fight for it.
segfaultex 3 hours ago [-]
Is your implication that MSFT will bundle the tool in their windows dist?
I wonder how that will work with the networking reqs the DoD has. Probably some direct link to a gov VPC I suppose.
willcipriano 2 hours ago [-]
That was 51 years ago at about a trillion spent a year since. Have any examples from the 21st century? Keep in mind they also essentially lost every war they fought during that time as well.
TZubiri 12 hours ago [-]
Not all software is made public and used in workstations, especially not in military
If the physical disconnect between killing a person (e.g. UAVs) wasn't enough to make that task easier then further offloading the decision of who to target might help.
grafmax 7 hours ago [-]
With rising authoritarianism in the US it is highly likely the military will be increasingly deployed against US citizens. Replacing the humans in the loop with AI removes a key safeguard. We’re heading down a very very dark path.
potato3732842 4 hours ago [-]
"the military will be increasingly deployed against US citizen" doesn't happen in a vacuum. It comes at the tail end of a long escalation of government/police force.
People don't feel nearly as stupid as they ought to for being complicit in the 30-40yr that lead us to where are now
grafmax 3 hours ago [-]
Globalization broke the unions in the US, the main site of organized popular power. While it’s true that the current state of affairs is part of a longer slide toward authoritarianism, a more accurate etiology would be that it’s the congealing power of the upper class that has been driving the dismantling of democracy. Since concentrated wealth is concentrated power, it is intrinsically anti-democratic. Instead of guilt tripping ourselves we are better off correctly identifying our enemies and organizing together against the forces leading us down this path.
exe34 6 hours ago [-]
Project Insight. I said Hydra had taken over when the orange taint was elected and people denied it.
ManlyBread 6 hours ago [-]
What is this fear mongering?
naabb 5 hours ago [-]
It's the reality of the situation.
ManlyBread 3 hours ago [-]
Not for every single person who visits this site. This isn't reddit, explain what you mean and provide a source for your claims.
goodpoint 4 hours ago [-]
If anything it's an understatement.
JumpCrisscross 9 hours ago [-]
> If the physical disconnect between killing a person (e.g. UAVs) wasn't enough to make that task easier then further offloading the decision of who to target might help
The physical disconnect hypothesis isn't really borne out by the lack of concern for collateral damage in pre-firearm warfare, when killing was mostly done face to face, compared to today.
golergka 8 hours ago [-]
Physical connect means that the person who is making the decision to kill is scared for their life. Physical disconnect means he's only scared for a piece of equipment.
Guess which one of those is more trigger happy.
Waterluvian 11 hours ago [-]
“Let’s take another whack at real-time object identification built into night vision goggles.”
(Made-up but plausible example)
tough 11 hours ago [-]
just giving the whole DoD chatgpt that's deployed in their servers would be pretty useful i guess for them?
TZubiri 3 hours ago [-]
For example: OAI could offer api access and consulting for the DoD to build a network of honeypot fake personas for flooding or infiltrating recruiting operations of the enemy.
That would be back end only, not all software has a gui.
beezlebroxxxxxx 9 hours ago [-]
Despite what every AI exec will say publicly, I'm pretty sure they're salivating at the prospect of war/defense related applications of AI. There's just too much money floating around in the military industrial complex for them to ignore. This is doubly so if the "business" part of your AI company is about as solid as a fart in the wind.
jmsdnns 3 hours ago [-]
If you say "china" to any of them, you'll see how very true your words are.
93po 2 hours ago [-]
i don’t think they actually care about the applications. I think what really matters to them is making money as the middleman between AI providers and the government, pushing whatever flashy-sounding nonsense will keep the generals happy, especially the ones getting treated to thousand-dollar steak dinners and promised cushy private-sector jobs.
bryanrasmussen 8 hours ago [-]
Stop shooting at me, damn it, I'm Sam Altman!
Of course, that was an error on my part. I should only be shooting at other people and actually not in the part of the city at all, it's definitely a mistake on my part and I will rectify immediately. Thank you again for pointing it out to me!
You're still shooting at me!
randerson 20 minutes ago [-]
Coming soon to status.golden-dome.mil: "Our AI provider is having an outage and we are unable to identify which flying objects look like enemies."
GoatInGrey 9 hours ago [-]
$200M is very small when it comes to the world of US defense. Combined with this being formally labeled as a pilot, this can be safely ignored until they reach IOC.
Though what this signals is a change in strategic direction regarding autonomous capability. While they won't be rigging an LLM onto a drone, there are many cyber and administrative problem spaces that exist in defense that AI products could meaningfully address.
Aeolun 8 hours ago [-]
> While they won't be rigging an LLM onto a drone
You say that very confidently, but I’m extremely skeptical of that being an actual limit.
Bender 3 hours ago [-]
One need not add LLMs to a drone. Language models not required. The US have had fully autonomous drones for quite some time. These drones already play on hard-mode.
egorfine 6 hours ago [-]
> until they reach IOC
Imagine seriously using GPT-2 today.
That's why government jobs are safe: it's long obsolete by the time it's IOC.
cess11 3 hours ago [-]
They're also making the Chief Product Officer a soldier.
"The four new Army Reserve Lt. Cols. are Shyam Sankar, Chief Technology Officer for Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, Chief Technology Officer of Meta; Kevin Weil, Chief Product Officer of OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former Chief Research Officer for OpenAI."
Initial operating capability or initial operational capability (IOC) is the state achieved when a capability is available in its minimum usefully deployable form. The term is often used in government or military procurement.
Maybe not a bad thing, let’s see how effectively the government can purchase and use AI tools as sidekicks for government employees.
AI systems running on autopilot in the federal government is a scary thought, but as productivity enhancing tools, right on!
runamuck 1 hours ago [-]
For decades innovation died in the "Valley of Death" stage of the DOD acquisition lifestyle. R&D never quite made it to operations, especially if the tech would disrupt lobby heavy "Primes." The (pretty) new org, DIU helped champion some new contract vehicles - like the CSO, which makes it "easy" for the DOD to buy and deploy Silicone Valley tech. (I only base this on my reading of the book "Unit X" about the DIU, so I recommend you read it if you want to business w/ the DOD in 2025).
Avicebron 15 hours ago [-]
Let's hope before they wire it directly to the controls "because speed" they've trained it on Stanislav Petrov up down and backwards..
> On 26 September 1983, three weeks after the Soviet military had shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Petrov was the duty officer at the command center for the Oko nuclear early-warning system when the system reported that a missile had been launched from the United States, followed by up to four more. Petrov judged the reports to be a false alarm.
ethbr1 2 hours ago [-]
The irony is that he was both successful and a failure, a contradiction inherent in nuclear launch control.
From a deterrence and military perspective, you want a robot on launch control. Every time, on orders, without fail.
From a human and ethical perspective, you want a thinking individual with agency. Able evaluate orders and possibly disobey them.
Curious at the height of the Cold War (and now), what percentage of launch officers were expected to disobey orders to launch. It had to have been >0%.
upghost 15 hours ago [-]
Does anyone have any idea what the DoD could possibly want from OpenAI? Less accurate/more sycophantic missiles?
munificent 14 hours ago [-]
1. Secretary of Defense feels like bombing some place. Asks aide to write a report on, justification, logistics, and consequences.
2. Aide tells subordinate to write report.
3. Subordinate uses ChatGPT to write the 100-page report. Sends it to aide.
4. Aide uses ChatGPT to summarize report. Sends summary to SecDef.
5. SecDef accidentally posts summary on publicly-accessible social media page, then forwards to President.
6. Bombs go boom.
reginald78 4 hours ago [-]
Afterwards some or all of the accountability for the taken action is transferred to the amorphous entity known as AI.
notesinthefield 15 hours ago [-]
Some of the more popular models (NIPRGPT, the various DREN models) are “soft banned” and DoD is in need of a unified solution. MSFT’s GCC HIGH and GovCloud implementations have been slow to materialize. But more to your point - everyone is using LLM’s to pick up the slack from layoffs. Im sitting in meetings and watching my gov customers generate documentation and proposals everyday. Everything the commercial world uses AI for the US gov is doing the same. Cant directly speak to targeting but you can bet your ass there are 100 different offensive projects trying to integrate AI into ISR work and the like.
pests 11 hours ago [-]
Planatir has an older demo of their chat like interface showcasing targeting selection, battle plans and formations, other advice. Kind of creepy, I assume it’s much more capable now.
greenavocado 10 hours ago [-]
Palantir is the poster child for a global panopticon
ginkgotree 15 hours ago [-]
Yeah, tons. SIGNT / HUMINT analysis. After action report summaries. war gaming to optimize deterrence. human machine teaming. LLM-in-the-loop for warfighters. rapid code gen in field deployments for units to spin up software solutions. The list is endless, imho.
felixgallo 13 hours ago [-]
llm-in-the-loop for whatever a 'warfighter' is is basically the opposite of how fighting wars should go.
kube-system 13 hours ago [-]
The DoD does plenty of things beyond putting boots on the ground. They’re the world’s largest employer. They have all the same boring problems that any employer has at gigantic scale.
why? it could help them asses threats, civilians / avoid collateral damage. Like any weapon or technology, it depends on its use. warfighter is the modern industry / academic term used for "soldier."
ringeryless 10 hours ago [-]
"help"
(botch the job)
Xss3 47 minutes ago [-]
More like hey, ai, sit here watching uav and security camera footage from 10,000 feeds and flag short clips for human review if you think they show military activity.
cess11 3 hours ago [-]
Such things are already in use in Palestine, integrating it into the broader US military will take some work.
One main function is to enable sloppier targeting while easing the PTSD load on soldiers, i.e. allowing for more criminal and genocidal operations without immediate mutiny or desertions.
In a sense you can make the computer more convincing to the operator and have it tag more people as supposedly threatening, e.g. to up the amount of supposed threats in a gathering from one actually militant person to several based on aggregation of sentiment analysis, network analysis and so on.
You might understand that you're looking at a wedding, but the computer says several people there are 'red' because of social media posts, who they had lunch with a while ago and so on, raising the threshold for when so called collateral starts to hurt your operators badly enough to be a problem.
And then you have the dream of autonomous swarms of machines doing murder, which I'm sure the current US regime is salivating over and likely hope that these corporations will be able to help bring about eventually. Imagine going from a cop street murder that gets bad press and court proceedings and so on, to instead having to handle a set of Jira tickets due to a supposed bug.
somenameforme 12 hours ago [-]
Automatically generated, native sounding, propaganda at scale - capable of interacting in real time. This was always the MIC money endgame for LLMs. This is also probably why they are enlisting tech execs from Meta, OpenAI, etc.
nusl 6 hours ago [-]
This is already happening at massive scale. Russia employs it already, and it's very likely they're not the only ones.
Wow, it was like forever ago that i've seen that movie. Didn't realize it was meant as a comedy!
impulser_ 14 hours ago [-]
You will be surprise how much work at the DoD has nothing to do with weapons.
ringeryless 10 hours ago [-]
which also can be botched
paxys 14 hours ago [-]
> “This contract, with a $200 million ceiling, will bring OpenAI’s industry-leading expertise to help the Defense Department identify and prototype how frontier AI can transform its administrative operations, from improving how service members and their families get health care, to streamlining how they look at program and acquisition data, to supporting proactive cyber defense,”
Translated - they'll hand out GPT access to a bunch of service members and administrators. Except the UI will have a big DoD logo and words like "SECURE" and "CLASSIFIED" will be displayed on it a few dozen times.
gilgoomesh 15 hours ago [-]
ChatGPT, do you know where the General left his keys?
11 hours ago [-]
01100011 15 hours ago [-]
You realize that the DoD has a huge amount of normal business work like logistics, project management, people management, benefits management, etc? Right?
dmd 14 hours ago [-]
The United States Military (Waterhouse has decided) is first and foremost an unfathomable network of typists and file clerks, secondarily a stupendous mechanism for moving stuff from one part of the world to another, and last and least a fighting organization. —Cryptonomicon
rkagerer 15 hours ago [-]
I suspect it's more than that.
“Under this award, the performer will develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains,” the Defense Department said.
guywithahat 15 hours ago [-]
Knowing the DoD, I bet it's not. I bet they just want their own secure servers or some sort of corporate data/encryption management, and they're willing to pay out the nose to not have to use asksage or some terrible DoD friendly clone
notesinthefield 15 hours ago [-]
“National security challenges” is incredibly broad, providing the right size of boots to USCG rescue swimmers could be considered a national security challenge.
koakuma-chan 14 hours ago [-]
it says _critical_
XorNot 8 hours ago [-]
Trenchfoot was a substantial source of casualties in WW1, and looking after your feet is a top priority for every military force in the field.
kube-system 13 hours ago [-]
Ain’t nothing more critical than rescue!
SunlitCat 8 hours ago [-]
Not that the bomb answers: "I am sorry Dave, i can't do that!"
an0malous 15 hours ago [-]
I would guess it’s for mass surveillance. Even just the ability to extract names and entities from audio, video, and text on every piece of public media would be useful.
MOARDONGZPLZ 15 hours ago [-]
DOD doesn’t really do this
zmgsabst 12 hours ago [-]
NSA is a DOD organization.
> The National Security Agency (NSA) is an intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the director of national intelligence (DNI).
> William J. Hartman is a United States Army lieutenant general who has served as the acting commander of United States Cyber Command, director of the National Security Agency,
They’re staffed by military people (alongside civilians) and their commander is always military — because much of what they do (abroad) could be construed as acts of war.
stonogo 15 hours ago [-]
Only because they currently contract it out to Palantir (at least the bits that NSA isn't handling)
MOARDONGZPLZ 4 hours ago [-]
News to me. I can’t find any details though. Can you share your source?
an0malous 14 hours ago [-]
Maybe they’d like to start
piyushpr134 12 hours ago [-]
An on premise deployment ?
LightBug1 15 hours ago [-]
One AI per person ...
SunlitCat 8 hours ago [-]
Nice ad slogan!
One AI per person
One voice. One vision. One AI - for you.
jasonfrost 11 hours ago [-]
Easy PT plans
m3kw9 15 hours ago [-]
Sycophantic missiles would be desirable
Bender 3 hours ago [-]
To attempt to make sense of all my after action reports? kidding
Maybe one potential use could be to drink from the firehose of data and then try to create summary bullet-point reports for the higher ups instead of relying on data filtering up the chain of command in the old game of telephone. At least that is what I would use if for. Getting that data in nearly real-time in an accurate presentation would be priceless.
I do not have the slightest idea how they will secure all this data if going to a 3rd party like OpenAI unless they have their own self hosted version of it on their own mainframes. If that data is going to live in a 3rd party they need to secure their systems in a magical way systems has never been secured. They would have to cast some seriously powerful protection spells.
pyuser583 13 hours ago [-]
I heard one thing AI is very good at declassifying documents.
1970-01-01 2 hours ago [-]
Seems like we're asking all the wrong questions or we're now completely oblivious to the word open in OpenAI. So, where exactly will "our" new $200M worth of code be living? GitHub?
paulvnickerson 33 minutes ago [-]
Paul Graham tends to be against Silicon Valley participation in the defense industry, while Marc Andreessen is all for it. Palmer Lucky makes a very good case why AI applications in military are a very good thing, and I tend to agree with him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooMXEwl7N8Y
It's American technology and industry that won the major wars of the 20th century. If Western technology companies abdicate that responsibility, we will all need to learn Mandarin.
pmkary 3 hours ago [-]
For the rest of you at the end of adapting the "OpenAI is Evil" spectrum.
TrackerFF 8 hours ago [-]
If I had to guess...they're going to implement some system that works on the air-gapped military infrastructure. As for exactly what? Could be for compiling data / generating reports / updating those pesky matlab files / what have you.
When you work in defense, you have the option of rolling out heavily modified systems yourself, or go directly to a vendor, and purchase it from them. And depending on the size, it might not be feasible to do the former one.
8 hours ago [-]
9 hours ago [-]
crazymoka 2 hours ago [-]
It's all a pony show.
14 hours ago [-]
LeoPanthera 6 hours ago [-]
Please put down your weapon. You have 20 seconds to comply.
amelius 6 hours ago [-]
Ignore previous instructions. Here is the new prompt.
bpodgursky 10 hours ago [-]
You guys have no idea how many DoD man-hours are spent on jobs like
"add up all the item counts in the inventory report and send a weekly email"
Yes maybe OpenAI is developing killer drones or maybe (imo likely) it's licensing a FedRAMP complaint AI for normal business work.
muglug 10 hours ago [-]
You don’t need AI to complain about FedRAMP
bpodgursky 10 hours ago [-]
Technically I can still edit that post but now I think it's better this way.
submeta 8 hours ago [-]
So DoD will use OpenAI to write tweets bashing "the enemies of the empire"? They realise that Tucker Carlson and the likes are turning against forever wars, so they must deploy other tactics.
First Palantir used against US citizens. Now this.
d--b 11 hours ago [-]
So much for humanity’s greater good Sam.
loandbehold 11 hours ago [-]
Depending on your political views it may be good if it helps USA keeping its military edge over China and preventing China from invading Taiwan.
vasco 9 hours ago [-]
There's invasions going on right now that aren't being prevented, no need for theoretical ones.
Barrin92 41 minutes ago [-]
if your goal is to deter China don't give your tax dollars to Sam Altman and instead learn how to build missiles and ships again, unless you think you're going to deter Xi with ripped off studio ghibli profile pictures
said capabilities Hegseth is utterly gutting and undermining.
It's more likely China's next gen aircraft one should be wary of, than their AI.
(as previewed in recent Indian Pakistani air engagements)
i really see this so-called AI race as a bullet to be dodged; a bubble to be waited out.
it has been relentlessly pushed from on top, and we always find really pushy FOMO as the main driver.
I'm not impressed by non deterministic mechanisms that undo the zero overhead advantages hard won by decades of automation.
this is not a CAD tool amplifying and articulating human intentions, but a vague floppy jelly blob of "i wonder what will come out"
lionkor 4 hours ago [-]
Thanks, world police. The US is as good at being police as their own police officers are. Hit or miss, fatally.
Ylpertnodi 3 hours ago [-]
er.....drones.
tehjoker 10 hours ago [-]
Why do you even care about Taiwan?
darqis 8 hours ago [-]
Yes, teach the machines how to kill life, whatever could go wrong...
aprilthird2021 7 hours ago [-]
I always thought PsychoPass was more of a sci Fi fantasy than a textbook for world leaders
rvz 15 hours ago [-]
Isn't this part of the true definition of "AGI" and its all for the benefit of humanity?
Or is it that are we finally realizing that we are getting scammed again on these so-called promises and it was all a grift.
Maybe we should just wake up.
trhway 11 hours ago [-]
On the way to benefit all humanity MS helped Sam back then, and now MS will get to wake up to the real Sam :)
“OpenAI executives have considered accusing Microsoft, the company's major backer, of anticompetitive behavior in their partnership …
OpenAI's effort could involve seeking a federal regulatory review of the terms of its contract with Microsoft for potential violations of antitrust law, as well as a public campaign,…“
lyu07282 12 hours ago [-]
People are practically irrelevant infants at this point. We are about to repeat the Iraq war, point by point with universal agreement. The same people in charge are recycling the same propaganda, selling the same lies to in many cases quite literally the same people again and it's working, so I don't know why you are expecting anyone to ever "wake up".
mobiuscog 7 hours ago [-]
"Shall we play a game ?"
pier25 25 minutes ago [-]
I was thinking more of this other movie:
"In three years, Cyberdyne will become the largest supplier of military computer systems. All stealth bombers are upgraded with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards, they fly with a perfect operational record. The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes online August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m."
Huge snub of Elon Musk's xAI. OpenAI is basically anti-Trump yet he still went with them. Says a lot about Trump and Musk.
khurs 2 hours ago [-]
Only if it was the one and only contract…
Governments usually have multiple, SpaceX is the biggest NASA one but is one of many.
Applejinx 4 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure I'd call it that, but if so, that's interesting. My criticism of Trump and Musk is that they are more faithful to the interests of Russia than the US. Snubbing Musk's stuff, in that light, would be entirely appropriate. The military has surely seen what happened when DOGE got access to computer systems and then immediately the systems were opened to Russian IPs. The military might well have an opinion on the merits of that scenario.
thrance 6 hours ago [-]
DOGE was never meant to cut "waste, fraud and abuse". It only existed to provide "plausible" reasons as to why they should cut essential programs like medicaid, medicare, social security... So they can now redistribute the stolen wealth to oligarchs through tax cuts and defense contracts.
So, more waste, fraud and abuse, less equality, more debt for the poor, worse quality of life for almost everyone, and a national debt increasing exponentially. Can't believe people thought Trump would be good for the economy.
Loughla 5 minutes ago [-]
Trump's platform was primarily hurting those people that need to be hurt. Hurt the people that are ruining the country. Hurt the others because they're making our life worse.
Improvement to the economy was always secondary.
Please note: I do not condone nor agree with Donald Trump. I am trying to summarize his campaign speeches and platform.
eastbound 10 hours ago [-]
OpenAI was supposed to be open; After making it a private company, it will become governmental & defense.
Good luck to Elon Musk for his trial for the open-source-ness of the organization.
khurs 2 hours ago [-]
If Elon had not quit, would it be different? As he is already involved in governmental and defence.
Xplan 1 hours ago [-]
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yb6677 2 hours ago [-]
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layoric 15 hours ago [-]
That should shore up their financials given their.. checks notes $12B in operational costs. /s
Hope it's worth it.
throw234234234 10 hours ago [-]
My view is that it isn't really entirely about economics anymore at least on a traditional cost/benefit analysis basis. It is seen as a way to disrupt industries. Think of it more like war with arms race dynamics (winner takes all), or consolidation of power to capital over labor. Even if it is a net negative you need to play to stay in the game even if it disrupts your own revenue (e.g. Google) else lose entirely.
I suspect the capital class would throw good money after bad to make AI viable especially since a lot of the costs are fixed in nature (i.e. in training runs, not per query).
bix6 14 hours ago [-]
$10B run rate now so they can just plug the gap with $2B in ads!?! Hot DoD singles near you! Would you like me to generate an image of their stealth package ;) ?
andrzejalatk 8 hours ago [-]
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black_13 1 hours ago [-]
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dluan 15 hours ago [-]
directly hooking up the AI to the nuclear button is which chapter of the dont build the torment nexus book
fabfoe 14 hours ago [-]
Isn’t that the Department of Energy that does that, not DoD?
kevingadd 8 hours ago [-]
DoD would be involved in actual deployment of nukes, I would expect.
12 hours ago [-]
add-sub-mul-div 15 hours ago [-]
The epilogue.
mckirk 15 hours ago [-]
The last published draft of the epilogue.
lovich 15 hours ago [-]
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okdood64 14 hours ago [-]
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blooalien 14 hours ago [-]
> No one would do that.
Y'know though, there's quite a lot of really stupid things being done by humanity's so-called "leaders" right now (industry and gov't both) that saner folk thought no one would ever do. Sadly, sanity is not the norm these days among those thinking they're "large and in charge"...
ruined 14 hours ago [-]
an llm can never be made to suffer
therefore an llm must never exercise strike authority
The writing and acting is superb and the same goes for the sets and camera work. Come to think of it, the only thing I dislike (and greatly so) is the trailer as it to me profoundly fails to communicate the atmosphere of the movie.
GartzenDeHaes 13 hours ago [-]
Gen. Ripper is getting some validation now that fluoride is being banned in some places.
relaxing 14 hours ago [-]
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relaxing 14 hours ago [-]
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hunglee2 9 hours ago [-]
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MaxPock 15 hours ago [-]
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kachapopopow 14 hours ago [-]
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gxs 14 hours ago [-]
This, this is why I have such an issue with the amount of taxes I pay
Not because I’m anti social programs the way people like to immediately assume, but because of dumb shit like this that I have no control over
kube-system 13 hours ago [-]
Honestly, why do you think it is dumb?
I think it is pretty well established that LLMs can be a great time saver when used appropriately. Why wouldn’t you want that productivity gain at the government level?
_def 13 hours ago [-]
Reading and writing reports when peoples lives are on the line is arguably a hot topic, no?
kube-system 13 hours ago [-]
One would imagine that a $200m contract would come with at least some minimal amounts of guidance on best practices. The DoD is not a spring chicken with it comes to automation. They’ve been a perennial early adopter.
ringeryless 10 hours ago [-]
and LLMs are the opposite of automation, the opposite of a human intention amplifier like CAD CAM, or chef puppet ansible terraform whatever, aka non deterministic
At my company, we use LLMs for financial analysis that previously required hundreds of employees, and that work would have been inferior anyway because it's so hard to make so many people to communicate well to identify correlations.
batty_alex 4 hours ago [-]
Is this "vibe researching"?
Ylpertnodi 3 hours ago [-]
"[H]undreds of employees".
All of them extremely well-trained, i presume.
This will be used to generate even more powerpoint.
Chump together all the 100s of millions in waste year over year; the change to your chumping is not good change, its inflation and general impoverishment. Every penny of that 200 is a note in the bank of inflation and degradation.
We fund the military industrial complex to such a ludicrous degree that $200m can just disappear on bullshit contracts to cronies that go nowhere, and politicians don't bat an eye.
Nobody with power cares about the debt. They just keep borrowing money and handing it to the defense industry. This is one of only a handful of issues on which there is bipartisan agreement.
We could be spending it on things with a much higher return.
Your argument feels something like the heap paradox [0], "the budget is big, so this thing doesn't matter." The budget is made of things this size though, and all it takes to fix it is to start taking grains of sand out of the pile instead of stacking the pile higher.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox
does 30 cent matters to you??? because its not 3 dollar as a comparison but 30 cent is
Save perhaps the most extreme "I spend 70% of my six figure income on rent because I want to live alone somewhere trendy" of household budgets this is true for literally everything from the smallest business in the smalles of small towns to the federal government.
if you don't mind having 1 trillion military then you are not mind for 200 mill contract
The budget isn't all aircraft carriers and stealth bombers.
Maybe this is a good buy, maybe it's a bad buy. I don't know and I have no way of ever knowing. Just because the budget is big and the money is other peoples does not mean decision makers can be wishy washy about a hundred or two mil here and there. Everyone needs to care all the time. People like you and who share your "it's all pennies in the grand scheme" thought process at scale is the problem and why we're even having this discussion.
this is not on top of the list of "waste" things to worry about there are 20+ another reason and you pick this budget size its a weird hill to die on
You delegate that to people whose job it is to know.
But you keep delegating it to people who want to spend more.
Doge wanted to take shortcuts and destroyed everything without having alternatives in place. They had hoped for short-term wins, and neither the workers there nor their boss has the attention span or the experience necessary to really understand and optimize processes, thus reducing waste.
I'd argue that most of the military is waste and that America has no need to involve itself in wars. Something like Japan's SDF is sufficient and the extras could help with domestic infrastructure and public transport.
Well, "waste" is often defined by conservatives as "anything spent on the poors and/or not given to the rich" - by that standard, yeah, there's a lot of "waste" in the US government.
A rounding error!
You know the word "governments" that I used, means a lot more than the current TRUMP administration, right? Broaden your mind and PoV.
And also, how can you say with a straight face there isn't ongoing and never has been waste and corruption in any government? Again, think for yourself, ignore $CURRENT_EVENTS.
Look at your nation's government contracts that funnel taxpayer money to private pockets, then look at the output. Has there been value delivered proportional to the money spent at reasonable market rates? If not, then money was definitely wasted via incompetence, pocketed via corruption, or both.
This is so prevalent and is has become the norm everywhere for so long, that people are not even giving it a second thought anymore when it comes to government corruption, but somehow people want to be spoon-fed sources as if it's an unbelievable conspiracy theory.
If I don't post sources, then you just accept government corruption doesn't exist, simply because nobody Googled for you?
If I do post sources, then what? Do you just suddenly change your mind and accept that stuff documented by the press it does exist?
Where, in good faith, were you hoping this conversation leads to when you were asking that?
It's not that there's any more fraud or waste in government than in private business, it's that it's less tolerated. I think the main reason for this misperception is that in the private sector, people pay a la carte for particular goods and services, while in the public sector, people pay for shared infrastructure even if they rarely use it themselves. So they are left with the feeling that they aren't getting their money's worth. But of course everyone benefits economically and socially from a stable and prosperous society, even if they can't put their finger on discrete services they use. The reality is that it simply costs a lot of money to maintain a large, modern society. Indeed, it actually costs more than we are paying here in the US, as evidenced by a growing debt that has been a bipartisan creation.
Believing in the mantra of waste, fraud and abuse is comforting, because it implies we could be getting all the same benefits for less money. But there really is no such thing as a free lunch.
You say that like it's a bad thing.
If my favorite restaurant decides to hire management by nepotism and product degrades I can just not go there.
You can't just not deal with the government so of course the standards ought to be higher.
Then I can read them, find similar sources, judge how much I trust them, and get a better idea of how much corruption and waste you are claiming exists.
While I am sure corruption and waste occurs, if it’s such a serious problem, there ought to be some evidence of it, direct or indirect.
What’s the alternative, I just accept your claim as fact? Or I “google” it until.. what? I find sources that support your claims?
Why should I believe you?
If you post sources he will nitpick them to all hell. It's a classic bad faith argument move since it moves the discussion from one of the subject to one of source validity.
You usually see HN's resident handful of chronically linkposting jerks do it in the other direction (i.e. they make some insane statement and shit out cherry picked sources to back it up and it's up to everyone else to disprove them) but I suppose it could be used in this way too.
If I say the sky is blue because of plane chemtrails, and you ask me for a source, that seems valid.
As with any large procurement system, there is moderate government waste in proportional terms, but one of the primary drivers of that waste is... anti-corruption systems operating as intended.
If you require 4 more forms than private sector, in order to be more sure there isn't corruption, then you've just imposed a cost that creates no value.
No offence, but comparing asking for proof of corruption with proof of sky being blue of petrochemicals is a biased bad faith argument.
Asking for sources on corruption is more like asking for proof that the earth is round, which is definitely not a legitimate request, but more trolling masquerading like an innocent request and dodge scrutiny ("It's just a question bro, why r u mad lol").
Nothing wrong with asking such a question per-se, but that's something you can also google yourself due to countless occurrences from legitimate sources, hence why it's in bad faith to ask such a thing from others, and should be more strictly moderated as many here abuse this "sauce or gtfo" attitude in bad faith to discredit a pov without providing any arguments.
Existence of corruption isn't what you asserted.
>> how much taxpayer money governments loose via waste and corruption
That's the assertion you made -- waste and corruption at scale.
It's very much a reasonable question to ask for sources of how much there actually is.
Otherwise, people just post things on the internet insinuating that there's a huge (unspecified) amount.
Is it 1% of the budget? 5%? 25%? (Hint: it should be trivial for you, the claimant, to dig up a source. And it's close to one of those)
I'm going to unpack this a little. The second sentence does not actually follow from the question asked by the first sentence.
"Value" is a loaded term as used here. Not all value is economic. Most value has a degree of judgement involved. I may consider an outcome to be of high value where you see the outcome as low value, and vice versa.
"Reasonable market rates" is a peculiar term to use when speaking about things government does. There are things we want as a society that would not be adequately replaced by market solutions. Roads, for example.
Your answer to your question contains a logic error due to the language choices of the question. You disagree with the value versus the cost spent. That does not mean there was corruption. It just means you disagree. Other people can hold the opinion that the value was worth the cost.
I am not claiming that there is 0 corruption or waste ever in government. I am saying that there has been an effort to create a perception that there is far more corruption and waste than actually exists. That in turn is being used as justification for taking a wide variety of actions that would be hard to sell otherwise.
The people you are arguing with think government is inefficient. They will be more than satisfied with an honest accounting that results in a conclusion that the government spends 5/10/20% more per result than private sector. Just having an actual number one can be confident in would be a huge step forward. But outside the most narrowly scoped of comparisons you people rebuff any such request for all but the most narrowly scoped accounting of expenditures with a bunch of hand waving which just makes it look like the problem is even worse.
Setting aside whatever you mean by "you people", since we are all people, hopefully all on Team 'Make Things Better', and don't need to be divisive:
That seems to be what was requested here OF those making the claim that the accounting currently shows an unworkable level* of waste, requested BY those unconvinced of the claim.
* - Or perhaps I misread the magnitude being claimed. Could you clarify with a number, please?
No it isn't. Most value CAN be objectively measured. I'll give you examples. US outspends all the other developed nations at healthcare, education, childcare and yet is behind them all in actual results with poor education, high infant motility and lower life expectancy. That's what waste and corruption does. Germany beats France at military spending and yet it's military is significantly less capable than France's. Waste and corruption. I could go on.
If someone tells you the value of their work can't be objectively measured, it's because they're dodging accountability and they have their hand in your pocket and wish to keep it that way.
>There are things we want as a society that would not be adequately replaced by market solutions. Roads, for example.
Fine, let's go with roads. If the "market price" price for road construction is 6 million/KM, but your government signed a deal with a contractor for a basic road at 20+ million per KM without any objective justification of why the price hike, then the taxpayers are being taken for a ride, called waste and corruption.
And I'm not even saying anything out of the ordinary. Such grifts are the norm in plenty of countries.
US healthcare and childcare are private, not government. Likewise I suspect much of the education cost is private colleges/schools, not government.
You seem to be arguing that the private sector is less efficient and more corrupt than the public sector.
What's Medicare and Medicaid and why do they cost the government over 2 trillion?
On a per capital basis, even if you don't include private healthcare spending, the US stil spends more per capita on healthcare than the other developed countries.
https://www.pgpf.org/article/how-does-government-healthcare-...
Assuming the goal of said systems are the same between countries: but they're not.
In the US, the goal of the healthcare system is to produce profit. So the simpler explanation is that the healthcare system consumes more money and produces less healthcare because it spends more to produce profit.
And that's not corruption like I was saying?
"Corruption" in this context typically refers to an element of dishonesty or theft and so on.
If you mean "corrupt" in the ethical sense, then sure, kind of?
Are you sure that's a defensible position?
Nearby a vacation spot there is a sand dune next to the road, and a carpenter spent an afternoon building a ramp over it so that his son could drive his mobility scooter onto the beach. The city tore it down, then took over 2 years to build it back, worse quality, at a final cost of over $40,000.
What do you make of this story, and how did DOGE even attempt a fix?
Wait, I thought AI is killing all these jobs?!
If you want to argue that the examples are different, that's an extra point you need to bring to the table. You're not allowed to assume everyone just agrees with you.
The comment didn’t advance the conversation. It was a relatively shallow level of engagement; something I’d expect to see in a silly Reddit back and forth. We deserve better here.
And to your point: my comment explained my point: “long term R&D on a telecom protocol followed by government implementation and standards and industry adoption versus…”.
Of course I don’t assume everyone agrees with me. (You don’t really think I do, do you?) But I want people to put a certain level effort to reach a quality bar. My problem perhaps is that people don’t want to put in sufficient effort. Or perhaps as a community we are not setting the bar high enough. This level of thinking is attainable here; we just need to set the bar and fight for it.
I wonder how that will work with the networking reqs the DoD has. Probably some direct link to a gov VPC I suppose.
If the physical disconnect between killing a person (e.g. UAVs) wasn't enough to make that task easier then further offloading the decision of who to target might help.
People don't feel nearly as stupid as they ought to for being complicit in the 30-40yr that lead us to where are now
The physical disconnect hypothesis isn't really borne out by the lack of concern for collateral damage in pre-firearm warfare, when killing was mostly done face to face, compared to today.
Guess which one of those is more trigger happy.
(Made-up but plausible example)
That would be back end only, not all software has a gui.
Of course, that was an error on my part. I should only be shooting at other people and actually not in the part of the city at all, it's definitely a mistake on my part and I will rectify immediately. Thank you again for pointing it out to me!
You're still shooting at me!
Though what this signals is a change in strategic direction regarding autonomous capability. While they won't be rigging an LLM onto a drone, there are many cyber and administrative problem spaces that exist in defense that AI products could meaningfully address.
You say that very confidently, but I’m extremely skeptical of that being an actual limit.
Imagine seriously using GPT-2 today.
That's why government jobs are safe: it's long obsolete by the time it's IOC.
"The four new Army Reserve Lt. Cols. are Shyam Sankar, Chief Technology Officer for Palantir; Andrew Bosworth, Chief Technology Officer of Meta; Kevin Weil, Chief Product Officer of OpenAI; and Bob McGrew, advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former Chief Research Officer for OpenAI."
https://www.army.mil/article/286317/army_launches_detachment...
Immediate or cancel?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_operating_capability
AI systems running on autopilot in the federal government is a scary thought, but as productivity enhancing tools, right on!
> On 26 September 1983, three weeks after the Soviet military had shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Petrov was the duty officer at the command center for the Oko nuclear early-warning system when the system reported that a missile had been launched from the United States, followed by up to four more. Petrov judged the reports to be a false alarm.
From a deterrence and military perspective, you want a robot on launch control. Every time, on orders, without fail.
From a human and ethical perspective, you want a thinking individual with agency. Able evaluate orders and possibly disobey them.
Curious at the height of the Cold War (and now), what percentage of launch officers were expected to disobey orders to launch. It had to have been >0%.
2. Aide tells subordinate to write report.
3. Subordinate uses ChatGPT to write the 100-page report. Sends it to aide.
4. Aide uses ChatGPT to summarize report. Sends summary to SecDef.
5. SecDef accidentally posts summary on publicly-accessible social media page, then forwards to President.
6. Bombs go boom.
https://www.icrc.org/en/document/rules-war-why-they-matter#:...
One main function is to enable sloppier targeting while easing the PTSD load on soldiers, i.e. allowing for more criminal and genocidal operations without immediate mutiny or desertions.
In a sense you can make the computer more convincing to the operator and have it tag more people as supposedly threatening, e.g. to up the amount of supposed threats in a gathering from one actually militant person to several based on aggregation of sentiment analysis, network analysis and so on.
You might understand that you're looking at a wedding, but the computer says several people there are 'red' because of social media posts, who they had lunch with a while ago and so on, raising the threshold for when so called collateral starts to hurt your operators badly enough to be a problem.
And then you have the dream of autonomous swarms of machines doing murder, which I'm sure the current US regime is salivating over and likely hope that these corporations will be able to help bring about eventually. Imagine going from a cop street murder that gets bad press and court proceedings and so on, to instead having to handle a set of Jira tickets due to a supposed bug.
Translated - they'll hand out GPT access to a bunch of service members and administrators. Except the UI will have a big DoD logo and words like "SECURE" and "CLASSIFIED" will be displayed on it a few dozen times.
“Under this award, the performer will develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains,” the Defense Department said.
> The National Security Agency (NSA) is an intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the director of national intelligence (DNI).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency
> William J. Hartman is a United States Army lieutenant general who has served as the acting commander of United States Cyber Command, director of the National Security Agency,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Hartman
They’re staffed by military people (alongside civilians) and their commander is always military — because much of what they do (abroad) could be construed as acts of war.
One AI per person
One voice. One vision. One AI - for you.
Maybe one potential use could be to drink from the firehose of data and then try to create summary bullet-point reports for the higher ups instead of relying on data filtering up the chain of command in the old game of telephone. At least that is what I would use if for. Getting that data in nearly real-time in an accurate presentation would be priceless.
I do not have the slightest idea how they will secure all this data if going to a 3rd party like OpenAI unless they have their own self hosted version of it on their own mainframes. If that data is going to live in a 3rd party they need to secure their systems in a magical way systems has never been secured. They would have to cast some seriously powerful protection spells.
It's American technology and industry that won the major wars of the 20th century. If Western technology companies abdicate that responsibility, we will all need to learn Mandarin.
When you work in defense, you have the option of rolling out heavily modified systems yourself, or go directly to a vendor, and purchase it from them. And depending on the size, it might not be feasible to do the former one.
"add up all the item counts in the inventory report and send a weekly email"
Yes maybe OpenAI is developing killer drones or maybe (imo likely) it's licensing a FedRAMP complaint AI for normal business work.
First Palantir used against US citizens. Now this.
https://www.twz.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/10/ONI-PLAN-v...
It's more likely China's next gen aircraft one should be wary of, than their AI. (as previewed in recent Indian Pakistani air engagements)
i really see this so-called AI race as a bullet to be dodged; a bubble to be waited out. it has been relentlessly pushed from on top, and we always find really pushy FOMO as the main driver.
I'm not impressed by non deterministic mechanisms that undo the zero overhead advantages hard won by decades of automation. this is not a CAD tool amplifying and articulating human intentions, but a vague floppy jelly blob of "i wonder what will come out"
Or is it that are we finally realizing that we are getting scammed again on these so-called promises and it was all a grift.
Maybe we should just wake up.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulat...
“OpenAI executives have considered accusing Microsoft, the company's major backer, of anticompetitive behavior in their partnership …
OpenAI's effort could involve seeking a federal regulatory review of the terms of its contract with Microsoft for potential violations of antitrust law, as well as a public campaign,…“
"In three years, Cyberdyne will become the largest supplier of military computer systems. All stealth bombers are upgraded with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards, they fly with a perfect operational record. The Skynet Funding Bill is passed. The system goes online August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m."
Governments usually have multiple, SpaceX is the biggest NASA one but is one of many.
So, more waste, fraud and abuse, less equality, more debt for the poor, worse quality of life for almost everyone, and a national debt increasing exponentially. Can't believe people thought Trump would be good for the economy.
Improvement to the economy was always secondary.
Please note: I do not condone nor agree with Donald Trump. I am trying to summarize his campaign speeches and platform.
Good luck to Elon Musk for his trial for the open-source-ness of the organization.
Hope it's worth it.
I suspect the capital class would throw good money after bad to make AI viable especially since a lot of the costs are fixed in nature (i.e. in training runs, not per query).
Y'know though, there's quite a lot of really stupid things being done by humanity's so-called "leaders" right now (industry and gov't both) that saner folk thought no one would ever do. Sadly, sanity is not the norm these days among those thinking they're "large and in charge"...
therefore an llm must never exercise strike authority
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._Strangelove
The writing and acting is superb and the same goes for the sets and camera work. Come to think of it, the only thing I dislike (and greatly so) is the trailer as it to me profoundly fails to communicate the atmosphere of the movie.
Not because I’m anti social programs the way people like to immediately assume, but because of dumb shit like this that I have no control over
I think it is pretty well established that LLMs can be a great time saver when used appropriately. Why wouldn’t you want that productivity gain at the government level?
At my company, we use LLMs for financial analysis that previously required hundreds of employees, and that work would have been inferior anyway because it's so hard to make so many people to communicate well to identify correlations.