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OpenAI wins $200M U.S. defense contract

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Re: OpenAI wins $200M U.S. defense contract

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

llm-in-the-loop for whatever a 'warfighter' is is basically the opposite of how fighting wars should go.

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.

Re: OpenAI wins $200M U.S. defense contract

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

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.

Re: OpenAI wins $200M U.S. defense contract

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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

Re: OpenAI wins $200M U.S. defense contract

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

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.

Re: OpenAI wins $200M U.S. defense contract

#185
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

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.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox

Re: OpenAI wins $200M U.S. defense contract

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 c…

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

Re: OpenAI wins $200M U.S. defense contract

#187
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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 tak…

200 million is 0.02 percent of 1 trillion.

does 30 cent matters to you??? because its not 3 dollar as a comparison but 30 cent is

Re: OpenAI wins $200M U.S. defense contract

#188
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did TCP/IP come from? It's on every computer.

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).

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.

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