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OpenAI wins $200M U.S. defense contract

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191–200 of 303 posts

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

#191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That attitude is exactly how we got to a 1-trilling military budget in the first place.

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

#192

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.

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

Nobody was given a contract to generate tcp/ip. And the protocol itself was mostly meaningless for decades.

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

#193
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand but that sounds funny

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov > 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.

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%.

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

#194

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…

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.

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

#196
post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

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.

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

#197
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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

#198
post #188
post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 jus…

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.

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

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That attitude is exactly how we got to a 1-trilling military budget in the first place.

then you can start with project that eat the money most

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

#200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Indian space program don't have armed forces that cover 80% entire planet
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