A journey from nonprofit to military contract.
OpenAI wins $200M U.S. defense contract
241–250 of 303 posts
Re: OpenAI wins $200M U.S. defense contract
#242Earlier 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.
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Re: OpenAI wins $200M U.S. defense contract
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Dunno. I think you're being pedantic about a point that is clearly incorrect. In fact the history of Pentagon-funded R&D is absolutely filled with wild success stories and with embarrassing disasters, as you'd clearly expect from any organization that size.
I don't think you're prior is correct at all here, and trying to dismiss a bleedingly obvious counterexample (I mean, come on!) as "shallow" just because it refutes your deeply held beliefs is exactly they opposite of "substantive engagement".
To wit: you're just wrong. Take the L.
Re: OpenAI wins $200M U.S. defense contract
#244"wins" as if it were any contest
Re: OpenAI wins $200M U.S. defense contract
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the point is that while people have indeed groused about government waste since the dawn of government, when people actually study it, they find that the rate of fraud and waste is comparable to the private sector. See, e.g., https://www.epsu.org/sites/default/files/article/files/EN_EF... for web.pdf and https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=8997844... . It's not that there's any more fraud or…
>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.
If your democratically elected government spends money in ways you find unwise, you can vote for someone else, so that also tends to self-correct (albeit on a longer time scale).
The problem isn't the obvious things, in the government or your restaurant example. It's the less-obvious things---your favorite restaurant might cheat on its inspections, for instance. The rate of food poisoning there may go up, but you'll still be unlikely to be the one that gets sick. And the prices will go down slightly, as they are able to cut corners. This kind of "waste, fraud, and abuse" tends to go to an equilibrium, where the cost of finding and eliminating the fraud is similar to the cost of the fraud itself. And this equilibrium happens in both government and the private sector.
The idea that a modern technological nation of hundreds of millions of people could dramatically cut its spending and maintain its standard of living is a utopian fantasy.
Re: OpenAI wins $200M U.S. defense contract
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Dunno. I think you're being pedantic about a point that is clearly incorrect. In fact the history of Pentagon-funded R&D is absolutely filled with wild success stories and with embarrassing disasters, as you'd clearly expect from any organization that size. I don't think you're prior is correct at all here, and trying to dismiss a bleedingly obvious counterexample (I mean, come on!) as "shallow" just because it refut…
> To wit: you're just wrong. Take the L.
There is no need to be a jerk about it. I explained my standard and thinking; we don't have to agree, to restate your earlier point. Your comment is choosing a "win versus lose" mentality.
Re: OpenAI wins $200M U.S. defense contract
#247Earlier 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
> 30 cent is
Not everyone pays the same amount in taxes.
> does 30 cents (or the actual value, $3) matter?
Not hugely, but the other point is still important. If somebody takes $3 out of my back pocket a few times each hour it adds up, and when the net effect is nearly guaranteed to be a transfer of funds to OpenAI with no benefit to the taxpayer (likely a negative benefit given our usual stance on letting monopolies run amuck) I'm especially salty about it.
Re: OpenAI wins $200M U.S. defense contract
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
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. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Initial_operating_capability
So MVP (minimum viable product).
Initial Operating Capability (IOC) is notably different from how many people think of Minimum Viable Product (MVP). From the Wikipedia page on IOC:
> "In general, attained when some units and/or organizations in the force structure scheduled to receive a system have received it and have the ability to employ and maintain it."
Contrast with these quotes from [1]:
> I have long defined minimum viable product as the smallest possible product that has three critical characteristics: people choose to use it or buy it; people can figure out how to use it; and we can deliver it when we need it with the resources available – also known as valuable, usable and feasible.
> I love the concept popularized by Eric Ries of the smallest possible experiment to test a specific hypothesis, but I refer to that that as an “MVP Test” so that people don’t confuse an experiment with a product.
Re: OpenAI wins $200M U.S. defense contract
#249Judging 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.
Don't forget "Lt Col. commissions will be bought."
Re: OpenAI wins $200M U.S. defense contract
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
Broken Window Fallacy. We could be spending it on things with a much higher return.
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.
The best possible use of funds would be "useful things", and these would produce benefits for people. "Nonproductive" indicates not producing these benefits. Government doing nothing is better than government "potentially" doing things that have no clear benefit or that are definitely nonproductive (like military spending).