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Providing ChatGPT to the U.S. federal workforce

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Re: Providing ChatGPT to the U.S. federal workforce

#171

Post by ACCount36 »

Yizahi wrote: post #168
Group_B wrote: post #30

Right now AI is in the grow at all costs phase. So for the most part access to AI is way cheaper than it will be in the next 5-10 years. All these companies will eventually have to turn a profit. Once that happens, they'll be forced to monetize in whatever way they can. Enterprise will obviously have higher subscriptions. But I'm predicting for non-enterprise that eventually ads will be added in some way. What's scar…

Except that LLMs doesn't benefit from economies of scale. And they don't have that much brand uniqueness, to retain customers, except some hearsay and "vibes". So if a lot of new free tier customers join it is net negative, because each of their queries has the same load as paid users. And company can't degrade LLM too much, because there is no uniqueness and free customers will just flee to the competitor. I'm think…

What? LLMs do benefit from economies of scale. There are a lot of things like MoE sharding or speculative decoding that only begin to make sense to set up and use when you're dealing with a large inference workload targeting a specific model. That's on top of all the usual datacenter economies of scale.

The whole thing with "OpenAI is bleeding money, they'll run out any day now" is pure copium. LLM inference is already profitable for every major provider. They just keep pouring money into infrastructure and R&D - because they expect to be able to build more and more capable systems, and sell more and more inference in the future.

Re: Providing ChatGPT to the U.S. federal workforce

#172

Post by stocksinsmocks »

bikeshaving wrote: post #66
janice1999 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm predicting for non-enterprise that eventually ads will be added in some way. Google has been doing this since May. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-30/google-pl...

How do you get an AI model to serve ads to the user without risking misalignment, insofar as users typically don’t want ads in responses?

I don’t want ads in my search either, and yet here we are.

Re: Providing ChatGPT to the U.S. federal workforce

#173

Post by bigyabai »

czhu12 wrote: post #149

Jeez, the amount of pessimism on this thread. It must be hard being a federal worker. On one hand, all things that go wrong get blamed on government inefficiency, but on the other hand, no one is allowed to adopt any technology that workers in every other industry get to use. Lump on the fact that they are often well underpaid relative to private industry and its no surprise why nothing works. At the moment, the IRS.…

Workers in every other industry don't get to use this. It would be utterly unacceptable if the local Subway forced you to go through ChatGPT to order your sandwich. The same goes for the federal government. My tax dollars aren't going to put up with an "agentic" FOIA request, god forbid the military brass or the federal reserve gets the bright idea of pawning off their duties to a stochastic parrot.

The private industry makes even more of these boneheaded administrative mistakes when given the opportunity. If you tried adopting the same work-from-home policy of the private sector over the past 5 years, you'd be changing your stance every other week. This is why we need consummate professionals in the government and not "disruptors" who can't teach a 101 class on their favorite subject.

> At the moment, the IRS.gov login page literally doesn't work [1],

Funny you mention that. Who accidentally fired all of the federal employees responsible for that website? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/18F

Re: Providing ChatGPT to the U.S. federal workforce

#174

Post by kube-system »

bigfishrunning wrote: post #161
kube-system wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government has a lot of text to process, and LLMs are good at processing text, and they can be implemented pretty safely in these roles. An obvious example might be: Someone who is trying to accomplish a task, but needs to verify the legal authorization/justification/guidelines etc to do that task. If they don't have the specific regulation memorized (e.g. the one person who was doing this esoteric task for 20 ye…

But does the job of verifying that LLM output outweigh the job of just doing the search the old fashioned way? Probably, but we'll skip verification, just like always. This is the scariest feature of LLMs; Failure is built into the design of the system, but people just laugh and call the failures "hallucinations" and move on. The efficiency gains from AI come entirely from trusting a system that can't be trusted

Not all implementations of LLMs are "just type questions into chatgpt.com or ollama and trust the raw result", even though that is probably what people are most familiar with right now.

They can be used pretty safely when incorporated into other systems that have guardrails on them. Not simply a dumb wrapper, but inside of systems that simply use LLMs as processing tools.

For example, one extremely safe use case is using LLMs as a search tool. Ask it to cite its sources, then string match those sources back against the source texts. You are guaranteed that the sources actually exist, because you validated it.

Re: Providing ChatGPT to the U.S. federal workforce

#175

Post by czhu12 »

bigyabai wrote: post #173
czhu12 wrote: post #149

Jeez, the amount of pessimism on this thread. It must be hard being a federal worker. On one hand, all things that go wrong get blamed on government inefficiency, but on the other hand, no one is allowed to adopt any technology that workers in every other industry get to use. Lump on the fact that they are often well underpaid relative to private industry and its no surprise why nothing works. At the moment, the IRS.…

Workers in every other industry don't get to use this. It would be utterly unacceptable if the local Subway forced you to go through ChatGPT to order your sandwich. The same goes for the federal government. My tax dollars aren't going to put up with an "agentic" FOIA request, god forbid the military brass or the federal reserve gets the bright idea of pawning off their duties to a stochastic parrot. The private indus…

I would also be annoyed if the local subway forced me to place all orders over the internet, or over a computer or phone, rather than just buying it in person with cash.

Presumably this also means that we should take those tools away from federal workers also?

I would be shocked if there use aren't cases that makes federal workers more efficient with AI, and for most normal industries, if there is a way to make people more efficient, its adopted.

I think the gutting of the federal workforce is also haphazard and awful, but how does that relate to this discussion?

Re: Providing ChatGPT to the U.S. federal workforce

#176

Post by joquarky »

542354234235 wrote: post #155
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some social science to be done on this just to see how effective this is. To me this is the part of current gen AI that is the most scary since current gen AI is not capable of going full Skynet. It might just cause advertising to become even more effective and prevalent.

It reminds me of optical illusions. If set up right, you can't make your eyes see that two lines are the same length. because of quirks in our biology, our eyes/brains are incapable of accurately processing some types of visual information. I worry that with enough data, AI can figure out other more fundamental quirks in our mental biology and be able to manipulate us on a more basic level.

Reminds me of Snow Crash where people were neurolinguistically programmed in Sumerian.

Re: Providing ChatGPT to the U.S. federal workforce

#177

Post by Yizahi »

ACCount36 wrote: post #171
Yizahi wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that LLMs doesn't benefit from economies of scale. And they don't have that much brand uniqueness, to retain customers, except some hearsay and "vibes". So if a lot of new free tier customers join it is net negative, because each of their queries has the same load as paid users. And company can't degrade LLM too much, because there is no uniqueness and free customers will just flee to the competitor. I'm think…

What? LLMs do benefit from economies of scale. There are a lot of things like MoE sharding or speculative decoding that only begin to make sense to set up and use when you're dealing with a large inference workload targeting a specific model. That's on top of all the usual datacenter economies of scale. The whole thing with "OpenAI is bleeding money, they'll run out any day now" is pure copium. LLM inference is alrea…

Single LLM company can't stop investing into better systems and marketing of them, because there is no moat and customers will flee to the ones who do invest. It's free after all. So it is a closed loop which can't be broken, companies can but won't switch to "just inference". And with investing, all of the LLM companies are losing money a lot (on the LLMs specifically).

Re: Providing ChatGPT to the U.S. federal workforce

#178

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

exe34 wrote: post #141
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this scenario, are you in the country illegally? If so, how is this any different than an immigration court serving you for a hearing? I get that immigration law enforcement is all the rage to rage about right now, but is this a threat of AI? I think the argument you might be trying to make is that based on Kroger submitting you grocery bill and VISA with your totals everywhere else, and the tickets you bought for…

> In this scenario, are you in the country illegally? If so, how is this any different than an immigration court serving you for a hearing? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/20/ice-secretly... I'll go with no.

Pretty intellectually dishonest that you look at “the largest mass deportation campaign in the nations history” which might not even be true since Obama deported 5 million immigrants, but clearly the intent is here. Then to point to one mistaken identity failure as anything but an anecdote.

Re: Providing ChatGPT to the U.S. federal workforce

#179

Post by queuebert »

missedthecue wrote: post #124
queuebert wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it were so easy, why didn't you post a few examples rather than insult me?

US Forest Service: 'hi chatgpt, here are three excel files showing the last three years of tree plantings we've done by plot and by species. Here's a fourth file in PDF format of our plot map. Please match the data and give me a list of areas that are underplanted relative to the rest, so we can plan better for this year' I use it for stuff like this all the time in a non-government job. 100% doable without AI but ta…

And do you think ChatGPT is always doing this accurately? There is no end-to-end logic, so what you get could be either bullshit hallucination or correct. This is not the correct use of the tool right now. Maybe in the future with a different architecture.

Re: Providing ChatGPT to the U.S. federal workforce

#180

Post by RandomBacon »

jojo2354 wrote: post #154
alterom wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>AI isn't causing the suspension of habeas corpus, humans are. Oh yeah, the "guns don't kill people" argument of the tech world.

Sig Sauer enters the chat

As a big Sig Sauer fan, that issue hurt.

I hope Sig Sauer can recover (ie make good AND safe guns again, and redevelope their goodwill).

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