Just this week Secretary Wright visited LLNL and while he made Ai as the next Manhattan project for the national labs. I got this feeling the next project for him was to cut back many of the programs.
Tri-Valley Cares needs to be on this if they aren't already. We need to make sure that NNSA and LLNL does not make good on promises to pursue such stupid ideas as doing Plutonium experiments on NIF. The stupidity arises from the fact that a huge population is placed at risk in the short and long term. Why do this kind of experiment in a heavily populated area? Only a moron would push that kind of imbecile area. Do it somewhere else in the god forsaken hills of Los Alamos. Why should the communities in the Bay Area be subjected to such increased risk just because the lab's NIF has failed twice and is trying the Hail Mary pass of doing an SNM experiment just to justify their existence? Those Laser EoS techniques and the people analyzing the raw data are all just BAD anyways. You know what comes next after they do the experiment. They'll figure out that they need larger samples. More risk for the local population. Stop this imbecilic pursuit. They wan...
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Yeah….I’m pretty sure we can get that project mission statement crafted in about a decade!
as very superficial and on the public-hype hairdresser level and not at all serious. If you know anyone in the actual field or AI, they already have much more advanced plans, new directions, new hardwares, combinations of neuromorphic, and new leaning approach. LANL just wants to do ChatGP because that is what is in the news.
A more cynical view is that this is just about getting more money to LANL and they already know we have no real hope of making advances in the field or that the implimentation of standard AI methods will have limited value.
"Anonymous
The cynical view is, unfortunately, correct. LANL doesn’t have more than a dozen qualified AI scientists. Yet we probably have twice that number of ill informed managers pushing the technology. It’s weak."
The Secretary might want know that LANL had several early efforts in AI/ML 10 to 20 years ago and that LANL management culture did not want to support this non-mission "sandbox science". Almost all those people left and now LANL has a well deserved reputation as a place that will not support real cutting edge and innovative science. We seem to be in a "follow the money" mode and we never innovate anymore or create new fields. 20 years ago it was all nano, followed by additive manufacturing, followed by exoscale.
What makes the AI thing so odd is we have managers who have used ChatGPT to write a memo and think ChatGPT can easily replace scientists. It is truly bizarre.