Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI wins $200M U.S. defense contract

cnbc.com

201–210 of 303 posts

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

#201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

200 mil for a government contract is peanuts when you see how much taxpayer money governments loose via waste and corruption

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".

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?

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

#202

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.

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.

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

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"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 d…

> That's what waste and corruption does. 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.

>Assuming the goal of said systems are the same between countries: but they're not.

And that's not corruption like I was saying?

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

#204

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.

There is no "should" in war beyond winning.

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

#206

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.

If Elon had not quit, would it be different? As he is already involved in governmental and defence.

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

#207

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.

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.

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

#208

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.

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.

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

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There is no "should" in war beyond winning.

absolutely, totally incorrect.

https://www.icrc.org/en/document/rules-war-why-they-matter#:...

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

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 on…

> 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?

Post reply on HN