AI chaos

 This is an interesting story, an AI threatens the apocalypse over a failed vending machine business:

https://youtu.be/si8DUlhiLlg?si=qfNx4nGnQ2H9tdAF

Once upon a time at LLNL...

 Back in the day, a Superintendent level manager at LLNL, set himself up for lab paid business related trips. His legally blind wife, decided to surprise him by adding herself on to his hotel reservation. To her surprise, the reservation desk, said to the wife, the second occupancy for the room was aleady registered, that being a subordinate administrative female assistant within the superintenden’s sphere of influence. Well, the blind wife’s coworkers in HR from that point forward, thought Mr. Superintendent was basically a low life scum bag.

But, after this low mark, could anything occur worse? Yes. And again, a free pass in terms of security clearance, and future advancement.

NNSA Staffing Shortages?

“Nuclear weapons woes: Understaffed nuke agency hit by DOGE and safety worries…For decades, the NNSA has struggled with federal staffing shortages that have contributed to safety issues as well as delays and cost overruns on major projects.”

Was the 2014 WIPP radiological accident attributed to “staffing shortages” when LANS took a 90% award fee cut for mismanagement when that accident was deemed preventable? Nope.

Were ~4x cost overruns and the ~5 year behind schedule at the NIF attributable to “staffing shortages”? Nope. How about failure to achieve ignition by 2012 as marketed to Congress? “Staffing Shortages”? Nope.

Was the 2023 radioactive iodine-125 contamination in Livermore due to “staffing shortages? Nope.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/05/18/nuclear-weapons-woes-nuke-agency-hit-by-doge-and-safety-worries/83621978007/

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AI in Science

 New AI showing how AI increases scientific productivity. This should be must reading for all of the NNSA employees.                

Moderator's note:

Papers on arxiv are not peer-reviewed.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.17866

Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product Innovation

Aidan Toner-Rodgers
This paper studies the impact of artificial intelligence on innovation, exploiting the randomized introduction of a new materials discovery technology to 1,018 scientists in the R&D lab of a large U.S. firm. AI-assisted researchers discover 44% more materials, resulting in a 39% increase in patent filings and a 17% rise in downstream product innovation. These compounds possess more novel chemical structures and lead to more radical inventions. However, the technology has strikingly disparate effects across the productivity distribution: while the bottom third of scientists see little benefit, the output of top researchers nearly doubles. Investigating the mechanisms behind these results, I show that AI automates 57% of "idea-generation" tasks, reallocating researchers to the new task of evaluating model-produced candidate materials. Top scientists leverage their domain knowledge to prioritize promising AI suggestions, while others waste significant resources testing false positives. Together, these findings demonstrate the potential of AI-augmented research and highlight the complementarity between algorithms and expertise in the innovative process. Survey evidence reveals that these gains come at a cost, however, as 82% of scientists report reduced satisfaction with their work due to decreased creativity and skill underutilizati
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A guy named Jason Pruiet

 LANL just lost a world leading expert in AI! Some guy named Jason Prueit. Odd I cannot seem to find a single paper or a references on AI that this guy ever did, so I am going out on limb and say he is not expert on AI. I guess "I played with ChatGP" makes one an expert.

"If you’ve played with the most recent AI tools, you know: They’re very good coders, very good legal analysts, very good first drafters of writing, very good image generators. They’re only going to get better."

I cannot find much of any impact from this guy. He gave some talk on AI and some reddit commentators seemed to see right through it. This is what they said.

Most of the bullshitters will tip their hand pretty early that they're just hype men for AI. Right off the bat, the fact that AI is disruptive and transforming society is apparently self-evident because they never cite a single premise or event to back this up. In the quote above, the phrase "if you've played" stuck out to me. Yes if you play around with them a little it's easy to believe they're really good at so many things. When you stringently evaluate them, you begin to see they make a lot of mistakes and perform inconsistently on even trivial tasks.

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NASA budget cuts

 This is a good video that goes into some of the NASA budget cuts:

https://youtu.be/si6paqM2_ug?si=A42L1ot-J_caWAFv

LLNS expectations

 What are the LLNS LLC expectations of managers actually selected for superintendent or above positions?