I thought it was a good idea in spirit although I wasn't sure how effectively it would be done. To be honest I'm still not sure how effective it was. Almost all criticism I've seen of DOGE has been from those biased against it already. Obviously federal employees will be negative about a program designed around reducing their scope and funding...
All you have to do is look at the non-serious initial claim of $2T savings. That is wildly high, and told you that the people running it had no interest in success. It’s like if we have a startup founder here saying they’re going to have AGI by Christmas and be the first $10T company.
That's a non-sequitur. Plenty of serious AI companies have made predictions about AGI or replacing programmers which have not come to fruition. That doesn't mean they don't have interest in success.
I said serious in the sense of something they seriously believe they can deliver. Those wild predictions on unrealistic timeframes are for the stock market.
For an example: Sergei Brin, Sebastian Thrun, and Elon Musk were all interested in self-driving cars. Musk has been making materially misleading statements promising to deliver L5 in the next year or so many times since 2013, and still doesn’t have more than L2. Waymo did not promise things they couldn’t deliver, treated safety as a top priority, and is expanding L4 taxi services around the country. They’re all interested, Waymo is serious, but Musk’s strategy has made him enormously rich and I think that’s always been his top priority.
