DOGE and How AI Could Infiltrate the US Government

0:00Today on the AI Daily Brief, what this new Doge thing means for AI. The AI Daily Brief is a daily video and podcast about the most important news and discussions in AI. To join the conversation, follow the Discord link in our show notes.

0:18Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief Headlines Edition, all the daily AI news you need in around five minutes. We kick off today with a story from OpenAI that bucks the trend that we have been seeing recently of executives leaving with an executive coming back. Greg Brockman, it turns out, was just on sabbatical. He was not free leaving the company. And as of yesterday, he tweeted, Longest vacation of my life complete. Back to building at OpenAI. According to reports, Brockman told staff that he had been working with Sam Altman to create a new role for him, focused on addressing significant technical challenges at the company.

0:53One of the points of discussion during Brockman's time away was how he did or didn't fit within the changing OpenAI executive landscape. Brockman is a much more hands-on builder than he is a manager, and it wasn't clear exactly how that was fitting in. The information and others had reported that there were some tensions with his leadership style, and so Bloomberg's report that Brockman had been working with Altman to create a new role makes sense based on that. Now, of course, in spite of all that, Brockman does return to a dramatically transformed company. Half a dozen senior staffers have left during his leave, including CTO Mira Mirati and co-founder John Shulman.

1:27Newly appointed CFO Sarah Fryer is refocusing the company on commercial applications of AI. And of course, the company is looking to ship a new generation of models, which have been marred with questions about a slowdown of progress. Brockman is now one of three out of 11 co-founders remaining at the company. And by and large, people are pretty excited. AI for Success on Twitter writes, Greg Brockman is back. AGI just got a day closer. Speaking of Mira Murati, we also got some reports around what she's doing now. The information writes ex-OpenAI CTO Mirati's new team takes shape. Almost immediately upon leaving the company, Mira Mirati had reportedly begun to pitch other OpenAI employees about joining what she was building.

2:07It appears that some have taken her up on that offer, including Miana Chen, a research program manager at OpenAI who worked on preparing AI models for release, ex-head of post-training Barrett Zoff, and former senior researcher Luke Metz. The information writes, Chen's loss is particularly significant given that she led the launches of a number of OpenAI's models and products, including GPT-40, O1 reasoning models, and advanced voice mode. Still, at the same time, we just don't know what Mirati's actually working on. Whatever it is, you can bet that there will be big venture checks waiting should they decide to go that route.

2:39News from another one of the big players, Amazon has announced a massive grants program to lure AI researchers to their hardware. Called Build on Tranium, the program will award$110 million in credits and grants. Partner universities can access$11 million in credits each, while individual grants of up to$500 ,000 will be available to the broader AI research community. AWS also said that they are establishing a research cluster of 40 ,000 Tranium chips that will be available for research teams and students. Gaddy Hutt, Senior Director at Annapurna Labs, the AWS chipmaking division, said, AI academic research today is severely bottlenecked by a lack of resources and as such, the academic sector is falling quickly behind.

3:16With Build on Tranium, AWS is investing in a new wave of AI research guided by leading AI research in universities that will advance the state of generative AI applications, libraries, and optimizations. The problem is fairly stark when you consider the numbers. Meta's training cluster used for their frontier models houses 100 ,000 GPUs, whereas Stanford's Natural Language Processing Group has 68 GPUs for all of its work. Still not everyone is happy to see the expansion of resources driven by a large corporation. Aus Keys, a PhD candidate at the University of Washington who studies the ethical impact of emerging technologies, told TechCrunch, this feels like an effort on generalizing a corruption of academic research funding.

3:53Then again, this is really just part of the process. By 2020, 70 % of AI PhDs already ended up working in private industry, in part due to the necessary access to compute. The number of papers with industry co-authors has nearly doubled since 2000. And while the government is taking steps to address the issue, like the National Science Foundation's$140 million investment to launch seven university-led national AI research institutes. It still seems like this sort of collaboration is just going to be the way that things work going forward. Lastly today, another big fundraise for an AI unicorn. Ryder has raised$200 million at a$1.9 billion valuation.

4:28Ryder is firmly in the enterprise realm, with CEO May Habib saying, At Ryder, we're not just creating LLMs that can execute tasks, but developing advanced AI systems that deliver mission-critical enterprise work. With this new funding, we're laser-focused on developing the next generation of autonomous AI solutions that are secure, reliable, and adaptable in highly complex real-world enterprise scenarios. With that, we wrap today's AI Daily Brief Headlines edition. Next up, the main episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Vanta. Whether you're starting or scaling your company's security program, demonstrating top-notch security practices and establishing trust is more important than ever.

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6:25The next three teams that sign up with 100 or more seats are going to get free embedded consulting. That's a process by which our super intelligent team sits with your organization, figures out the specific use cases that matter most to you, and helps actually ensure support for adoption of those use cases to drive real value. Go to bsuper.ai to learn more about this AI enablement network. And now back to the show. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. Today, Today we are talking about the new Department of Government Efficiency and what the implications are for artificial intelligence. And just before we get into this, one quick caveat.

7:01The AI Daily Brief is obviously not a political show. We've done a little bit more political coverage recently, simply based on the fact of the elections and all the discourse surrounding what a new administration means for AI. But by and large, the way that I see this show is we are about, one, technology advancements and actually helping you understand what's changing about the technology itself. And two, real-world implications with an emphasis on business. We talk a lot, obviously, about how companies are using AI, how they're thinking about integrating it, what it means for the structure of different industries.

7:33In a distant third is the policy surrounding AI. Now, we do cover it because obviously it's going to have a deterministic impact on how AI shakes out. But in most circumstances, it's not where I want the emphasis to be. However, for the purposes of today's conversation, I actually think that there are not enough people talking about what this new Doge thing means for AI. So first of all, what the heck am I talking about? Yesterday, an announcement started floating around X that many people thought at first was a joke. Basically, it said that President-elect Trump was appointing Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead something new called the Department of Government Efficiency.

8:08The statement read, Together, these two wonderful Americans will pave the way for my administration to dismantle government bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure federal agencies. This will send shockwaves through the system and anyone involved in government waste, which is a lot of people. Trump went so far as to call this potentially the Manhattan Project of our time. He said that Republicans have dreamed about the idea of being able to effectively take a wrecking ball to bureaucracy for a long time, and that this was the opportunity. He even gave it a little bit of symbolic chutzpah when he proclaimed that the work would conclude no later than July 4th, 2026, which is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

8:44Of course, a lot of the discussion initially was about the name. The acronym for the Department of Government Efficiency is DOGE, which is of course the original crypto meme coin, and something that Elon Musk has long had a flirtation, and frankly a love for. However, it's also quite clear that the initiative as a whole is not being treated as a meme. Vivek, for his part, is giving up the chance to be appointed to the Senate in order to run this thing. Elon has been talking about this for some time. In one of his many interviews recently, he said there are around 428 federal agencies. There's so many that people have never even heard of.

9:15I think we should be able to get away with 99 agencies. Anyway, the point being that this is a real thing. Now, it strikes me that there are likely to be two phases of this. The first phase inevitably is going to be about some amount of cutting and just going through and trying to find areas where there's opportunities to slash. If you go cruise around Twitter or X, it's basically a crowdsourced list of all the things that people find wasteful. However, if the first phase is all about just rooting out where there's potential waste, it seems inevitable that the question of how to make what's left more efficient is going to arise as well.

9:46And that, my friends, is where AI enters the discourse. AI policy reachers Miles Brendage writes, surprised not to see more discussion of the intersection of Doge and AI, as in the heavy lifting of cost reduction seems like Medicare and Medicaid rather than a bunch of small things. And that raises the question of whether AI could help on those big ticket items. Miles points out that, quote, Doge will coincide time-wise over the next two years, with AI surpassing human expert performance on a very wide range of medical and administrative tasks. Y Combinator partner Harsh Tagar writes, AI is great at automating repetitive administrative work and the government needs to reduce spending.

10:20Combine those two ideas and now could be a great time to build software to make the government run more efficiently. YC would love to fund any builders up for the challenge. Lawrence Muir writes, If I had to take a guess at a Doge idea, the IRS could be in large part eliminated by a combination of a flat tax and fraud detection audit software powered by AI that's akin to what PayPal used. Makes returns much easier, disincentivize evasion, automate the process. AI entrepreneur Bindu Reddy also pointed to healthcare, saying, Healthcare is exorbitantly expensive and supremely inefficient in America.

10:48This is a combination of corruption, red tape, cabals who restrict licenses, and onerous regulation. Now, of course, not everyone is excited about this. Ali Al-Khatib writes, Per recent Doge News, my guess is Elon and Vivek will most likely turn to AI and tech companies for contracts to swap out bureaucrats for algorithmic systems in an attempt to retain the sprawling power of an authoritarian state with less of a headcount. Now, even beyond Doge, there's also a lot of discourse going around right now around how Elon has the ear of the president and what it means specifically for artificial intelligence.

11:17On Sunday, CNN wrote, Elon Musk exerts deepening influence on Donald Trump's presidential transition. Quote, Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago club has been brimming in the last 48 hours with two kinds of people, those angling for a job in the president-elect's incoming administration, and those trying to influence him into hiring their picks for the top spots. But the one person who has loomed over it all and has exerted a great deal of influence is Elon Musk, according to multiple sources. The tech billionaire has been seen at the resort in Palm Beach, Florida almost every day since Trump won the election last week, dining with him on the patio some evenings and hanging out with his family Sunday at the golf course.

11:49On November 11th, The Verge published, The push for Elon Musk to lead American AI policy is already starting. The story is specifically about a public petition from the Americans for Responsible Innovation for Trump to make Elon Musk his special advisor on AI. The ARI is led by former Democratic Representative Brad Carson and said in the petition that, quote, no one is better equipped to help the Trump administration make America lead on AI than Elon Musk. Interestingly, part of the reason for this is Elon's consideration of AI safety issues. ARI policy analyst David Robusto wrote in a blog post recently, Musk could emerge as a champion for AI safety in the administration.

12:25They pointed to, for example, his public support of California's SB 1047, which ultimately California Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed. Of course, there are some conflict of interest issues given that Elon runs a big AI lab. Alex Kantrowitz of the Big Technology Podcast writes, Just imagine Sam Altman walking into the White House for a conversation about AI regulation next year only to see Elon Musk sitting across the table. Still hold aside all that and come back to this question of Doge. And mostly from entrepreneurial circles, there is just tons of excitement. JT writes, What if Doge becomes the largest application of AI agents in history?

12:59Agents could analyze budgets, process complaints, identify ineffective rules and regulations, automate administrative tasks, etc. There's a real chance at modernization here. Going out even more broadly, A16Z partner Sriram Krishnan writes, Vibe shift. Think this is one of the most exciting times to build new things. From media to how AI can change existing industries or making government efficient, there's a tangible excitement in the air. And while I think there are plenty of folks who are still reeling from last week's election results and, of course, a huge variety of opinions about this new administration, when it comes to the entrepreneurship vibe, I think that's dead on.

13:34So will we see the Department of Government Efficiency be the way that AI infiltrates the U.S. government? Only time will tell. For now, that's going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief. Appreciate you listening as always. And until next time, peace.

13:52Thank you.