"Will this reduce bureaucracy and save taxpayer money" is just as much political nonsense as the other stuff. Taxpayer money unspent is not an unalloyed good. Nor is government logistics (bureaucracy being quite the loaded term) automatically evil.
Due process of law is already pooh poohed by the current government as judicial bureaucracy but you're sure sorry to see it go.
$1 trln+ of dollars on defence is not "nonsense". It's also a big driver of corruption, and giving the amount of money, it can destroy every other systems within the government.
Having AI in the mix could potentially fix the problem(partially).
AI is a big driver of literal direct physical corruption. Language and knowledge is forever tainted because of an outpouring of AI generated spam. Evaluating resumes is more difficult now because you can't tell real impacts versus fabricated hallucinations. Open source projects are overwhelmed with AI generated PRs...
Any corruption is emboldened by AI, it's a catalyst of the problem, doesn't seem anywhere close to potentially being a fix
An unbiased AI with access to all the military contracts would likely result in a lot of upset contractors who are used to scamming the government for as much as they can get away with. Grok by Musk (sounds like an awuful perfume!) is biased by design, not to mention the conflicts of interest.
That's a pretty wild false dichotomy; you think that the only possible option for reducing corruption in the government in the defense industry is paying billionaires for their AI products?
> Having AI in the mix could potentially fix the problem(partially).
Any examples?
As far as I understand, claims in the current AI cycle are wildly exaggerated, and sometimes companies rely on sort of circular deals to make revenue appear higher than it actually is, e.g. OpenAI and Microsoft or Nvidia. Wouldn't that mean that AI companies are primed to oversell and underdeliver, effectively making the problem even worse?
> Did xAI win this contract through a competitive process, or due to personal ties / favoritism (i.e., corruption risk)?
I think this is a fair question. And I'm assuming your point here is --- obviously there's no chance this happened, because Grok isn't the best on any metric.
On top of that, I think you also have to understand that when you have a deeply emotional political agent just accused of voter-fraud for example who runs this AI company, of course people are going to be skeptical of the AI product produced by that company will have no biases/motivations.
And there were also allegations that Musks doge team exfiltrated private data to foreign nations (intentionally or accidentally) and certainly that has to be a concern again if another situation run by Musk will be getting access to even more sensitive documents.
So to your point, yes this is wrong on every metric.
On your first question, it is impossible to unlink it from Twitter, since Musk being feverishly active there, and then buying the platform, was the catalyst for a new wave of right wing support for him and his industries.
If you take the claims at face value, then the process was 100% fair and xAI provides the best models and guardrails for processing top secret data at a lower cost, compared to the competition. Personally, I find this unlikely.
We also know that Musk has been cozy with the current administration, and spearheaded the very same “efficiency” campaign at show here.
I think it would be naive to blindly believe Musk and the DOD claims and ignore their common history.
The Roman salute one, neatly demonstrated by the statue of Marcus Aurelius on the Capitoline Hill in Rome, the original of which is in the museum next door which I've been two, twice?
If Ford was around today, I imagine he would get a lot of shit for that. So, I'm not sure what your point is.
The big picture is that musk is obviously both mentally unstable and overall a piece of shit person. You might say that doesn't matter. I think most people think it does.
When those types of people get to make big decisions, they usually make bad or shortsighted ones.
In US politics, we have two big problems: people get to make decisions far too big for them simply because of their wealth, and those people are often the absolute bottom of the barrel of humanity who shouldn't be trusted to tie their own shoes, let alone pivot our country in any direction.
But if Musk actively identifies himself as a Nazi, how is that name-calling?
His family left Canada to move to South Africa because they were in leadership roles in the Canadian Nazi party.
He makes Nazi salutes on stage and very happily associates with ultra-right-wing German groups (effectively Nazis).
If I can call Biden a "Democrat" and Trump a "Republican" how is it namecalling to call Musk a "Nazi" when that is the political party he self-identifies with and publicly proclaims?
Maxdo, I appreciate your moral stance. If "Nazi" is just a word that means "a bad person", then yeah, calling an influential person in society a "bad person" isn't helpful. As you say, name-calling doesn't help.
However, as you also say, it is important to try to see the reality. Musk is a Nazi.
