“The Defense Digital Service was created in 2015 to help the Pentagon adopt fast tech fixes during national security crises and push Silicon Valley-style innovation inside the Pentagon. It built rapid response tools for the military during the Afghanistan withdrawal, databases to transfer Ukrainian military and humanitarian aid, drone detection technologies and more.
Without the program, some key efforts to streamline the DOD’s tech talent pipeline and counter adversarial drones will be sunsetted, one soon-to-be former employee said.
Once dubbed the Pentagon’s “SWAT team of nerds,” DDS was one of the department’s earliest efforts to inject Silicon Valley ethos into its massive bureaucracy.”
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“every employee interviewed said they wouldn’t have left if it wasn’t for DOGE.
One former senior Pentagon official, who asked not to be named because of possible retaliation, described DOGE’s wider incursion into the Defense Department as damaging and unproductive
“They’re not really using AI, they’re not really driving efficiency. What they’re doing is smashing everything,” the former official said.”
The F-22 could have been far more capable, but the U.S., thinking threats to its air superiority were over, canceled the upgrades to save money. Now, U.S. air superiority is threatened by China.
“The Aiviq’s Louisiana builder has made more than $7 million in political contributions since 2012. For much of that time, Edison Chouest sought to sell or lease the ship.”
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“The Coast Guard’s $125 million purchase of the Aiviq, made under congressional pressure, follows the service’s failure to get its preferred, $1 billion model built.”
“According to OpenAI’s press release outlining the Stargate project, the partners will begin deploying $100 billion immediately. The key technology partners are Arm Holdings, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, and OpenAI. Initial funding will be supplied by Softbank, OpenAI, Oracle, and the MGX AI investment fund based in the United Arab Emirates. Starting with a gigantic data center currently under construction in Abilene, Texas, the ultimate goal is to build as many as 20 AI data centers scattered around the country over the next four years.
“Stargate will be building the physical and virtual infrastructure to power the next generation of advancements in AI,” declared President Trump. He further suggested, “I think it’s going to be something that’s very special. It’ll lead to something that could be the biggest of all.” How special? How about the development of artificial superintelligence?
“I think AGI is coming very, very soon,” said Son. Artificial general intelligence (AGI) are systems capable of performing any intellectual task that a human can. But Son didn’t stop with just the advent of human-level capabilities. “After that, artificial superintelligence will come to solve the issues that mankind would never, ever have thought that we could solve. Well, this is the beginning of our golden age,” he observed.”
“more than 42,000 Americans die in collisions every year. Based on the above-mentioned research, AVs have dramatically lower bodily-injury rates. If governments slow approval of self-driving cars—or give local governments the ability to stop their use based on anecdotes and irrational fears—then we’ll likely have more deaths and injuries.”
“DeepSeek also claims to have needed only about 2,000 specialized chips from Nvidia to train V3, compared to the 16,000 or more required to train leading models, according to the New York Times. These unverified claims are leading developers and investors to question the compute-intensive approach favored by the world’s leading AI companies. And if true, it means that DeepSeek engineers had to get creative in the face of trade restrictions meant to ensure US domination of AI.”