How about making everyone an "engineer"?

 Should LLNL and and LANL follow Musks lead and make everyone an engineer?

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/new-updates/elon-musk-bans-researcher-title-at-xai-says-only-engineers-welcome/articleshow/123013891.cms?from=mdr

Elon Musk has ordered the immediate removal of the job title 'researcher' at xAI, insisting that all technical staff be called 'engineers'. The change followed a public correction of an employee’s job post on X. Musk said the term was outdated and encouraged a false division of roles. Meanwhile, Meta is testing AI-enabled interviews, letting candidates use AI tools during assessments. Both moves highlight how major tech companies are redrawing the boundaries of what it means to work in AI.

DOE sued

Cornell University and the University of Rochester have joined a lawsuit against the Department of Energy and the DOE secretary, Chris Wright.

The lawsuit alleges that the DOE took "flagrantly unlawful actions" by "slashing 'indirect cost rates' for government-funded research."

 https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-ny/education/2025/04/15/colleges-lawsuit-department-of-energy

The NNSA hacked!

 The NNSA was “hacked”

Microsoft says China-backed cybercriminals hacked into US nuclear weapons agency

https://nypost.com/2025/07/23/tech/microsoft-says-china-backed-cybercriminals-hacked-into-us-nuclear-weapons-agency/

AI hype

 More push back against AI. There is a realization that AI has severe limits in what it can do and that the field has a lot of hype. The idea that AI is going to replace large sections of the STEM workforce is simply not true. AI could replace bureaucratic or repetitive jobs but not jobs that require actual thinking. I think it could be a tool to aid in thinking and creative process but the big hope that it will "do" science, endangering, create new products on its own is not going to happen and in fact it could hinder or reduce the quality of science and engineering in some cases. A lot of LANL managers or ex managers have been saying the most naive things about AI and just unaware of where the field is actually heading.

https://medium.com/quantum-information-review/ai-has-a-critical-flaw-and-its-unfixable-06d6a5c294d4

AI Has a Critical Flaw — And it’s Unfixable.

"AI isn't intelligent in the way we think it is. It's a probability machine. It doesn't think. It predicts. It doesn't reason. It associates patterns. It doesn't create. It remixes. Large Language Models (LLMs) don't understand meaning -- they predict the next word in a sentence based on training data."

"The widespread excitement around generative AI, particularly large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and DeepSeek, is built on a fundamental misunderstanding. While these systems impress users with articulate responses and seemingly reasoned arguments, the truth is that what appears to be 'reasoning' is nothing more than a sophisticated form of mimicry.

These models aren't searching for truth through facts and logical arguments--they're predicting text based on patterns in the vast datasets they're 'trained' on. That's not intelligence--and it isn't reasoning. And if their 'training' data is itself biased, then we've got real problems.

I'm sure it will surprise eager AI users to learn that the architecture at the core of LLMs is fuzzy--and incompatible with structured logic or causality. The thinking isn't real, it's simulated, and is not even sequential. What people mistake for understanding is actually statistical association."

Sounds familiar?

 This story relates to LLNS as well

“New Embarrassing Details About Married CEO Caught Cuddling With HR Chief at Coldplay Concert”

The same behavior has happened at LLNL, just ask the wife’s and sub-contractor employee victims, of threat to be silent, or face firing for witnessing such conduct.

MODERATOR NOTE:

The link below takes to a private video. Please provide public link to it.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=u9NXHYcMSSs&pp=ygU_TmV3IEVtYmFycmFzc2luZyBEZXRhaWxzIEFib3V0IE1hcnJpZWQgQ0VPIENhdWdodCBDdWRkbGluZyBXaXRo

Anti-Semitic garbage in, anti-Semitic garbage out

 https://www.theringer.com/2025/07/09/tech/ai-x-grok-elon-musk-linda-yaccarino-hitler

Elon Musk's "improved" chatbot was producing far-right hate speech.

Will Wright be right?

 https://fedscoop.com/energy-secretary-signals-reversal-of-some-cuts-to-national-labs/

Multiple lawmakers on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee shared their concerns with Wright during a DOE budget hearing about the proposed $2.75 billion cut to the national labs in the White House’s fiscal 2026 proposal, saying it undercuts his oft-stated tech priorities.

Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., ranking member of the panel, said engineers at the Sandia National Laboratories have told him the proposed cuts will “significantly affect” national user facilities, fusion research on reactor environments, the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies and more.

Wright said the budget hasn’t been allocated down to each individual lab, and that funding decisions will be made “on a lab-by-lab basis.” He said the proposed cuts are a reflection of “the tough world we’re in today.”

“My goal is to grow, not shrink, the output of top-quality science at our labs,” Wright said. “But do we need to be a little wiser and get the political science, not the real science, out of labs? Do we need to be a little bit more efficient running labs? We do.

Congress cuts NNSA nonproliferation budget

 Lab management at LANL isn't communicating, but fortunately, I can read the news. The news reports are that NNSA is moving everything not directly weapons related over to weapons. For example, non-proliferation research is getting torched. Also, energy sciences like fuel cells, solar, CINT, etc will get entirely eliminated or dramatically slashed:

https://www.taxpayer.net/energy-natural-resources/doe-topline-cuts-across-the-board-except-for-nuclear-weapons/

"DOE energy programs would be cut by 25%. On top of fairly consistent cuts across the board, the budget calls to fully eliminate several programs, including R&D for Hydrogen and Fuel Cell Technologies, Renewable Energy Grid Integration, Solar Energy, and Wind Energy, as well as the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations.

Defense-related programs would get a 17% funding boost, almost entirely from DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which houses the nation’s nuclear weapons programs and DOE’s nuclear non-proliferation programs (though nonproliferation funding takes a cut). The NNSA budget does not fund the aircraft, submarines and missiles that make up the military’s nuclear “triad,” which are funded within the Pentagon’s annual budget, but it does fund the nuclear warheads these systems are designed to deliver."

https://www.armscontrol.org/act/2025-04/news/congress-cuts-nnsa-nonproliferation-budget

"The U.S. Congress approved a $185 million cut to the defense nuclear nonproliferation budget managed by the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) in a March 14 continuing resolution that funds the federal government through Sept. 30, the end of the 2025 fiscal year.

The resolution transfers those funds instead to the NNSA’s weapons activities budget, bringing it up to $19.29 billion for the remainder of this fiscal cycle."

What's going on?

 Things are going sideways at Los Alamos. Any news at LLNL?

Blog moderator's note:

I tried getting details from the poster but he hasn't responded. If anyone else can give more detail, it's appreciated 👍.

New fusion research facility

 Pacific Fusion proposed Livermore facility:

https://www.livermorevine.com/livermore/2025/06/30/livermore-eyed-for-new-fusion-research-facility/

Based largely on proposed next generation Sandia pulsed power machine that NNSA passed on after failed design reviews. Unclear why investors think a machine that can fire once a day can put power on the grid.