Elon Musk's so-called Department of Government Efficiency has deployed a proprietary chatbot called GSAi to 1,500 federal workers at the General Services Administration, WIRED has confirmed. The move to automate tasks previously done by humans comes as DOGE continues its purge of the federal workforce. GSAi is meant to support 'general' tasks, similar to commercial tools like ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude. It is tailored in a way that makes it safe for government use, a GSA worker tells WIRED. The DOGE team hopes to eventually use it to analyze contract and procurement data, WIRED previously reported. 'What is the larger strategy here' Is it giving everyone AI and then that legitimizes more layoffs'' asks a prominent AI expert who asked not to be named as they do not want to speak publicly on projects related to DOGE or the government. 'That wouldn't surprise me.' In February, DOGE tested the chatbot in a pilot with 150 users within GSA. It hopes to eventually deploy the product across the entire agency, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The chatbot has been in development for several months, but new DOGE-affiliated agency leadership has greatly accelerated its deployment timeline, sources say....
During his three presidential campaigns, Donald Trump promised to run the federal government as though it were a business. True to his word, upon retaking office, Trump put tech billionaire Elon Musk at the head of a new group in the executive branch called the Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE, as Musk's initiative is known, has so far fired, laid off or received resignations from tens of thousands of federal workers and says it has discovered large sums of wasted or fraudulently spent tax dollars. But even its questionable claim of saving US$65 billion is less than 1% of the $6.75 trillion the U.S. spent in the 2024 fiscal year, and a tiny fraction of the nation's cumulative debt of $36 trillion. Because Musk's operation has not been formalized by Congress, DOGE's indiscriminate cuts also raise troubling constitutional questions and may be illegal. Before they go too far trying to run the government like a business, Trump and his advisors may want to consider the very different example of the nation's first chief executive while he was in office....
The fate of Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who launched on the first crewed flight of Boeing's Starliner spacecraft on June 5, 2024, has become a political issue after President Donald Trump and SpaceX founder Elon Musk said the astronauts' return was held up by the Biden White House. In February, Trump and Musk appeared on FOX News. During the joint interview, the subject of Wilmore and Williams came up. They remain in space today after NASA decided it would be best they did not fly home in their malfunctioning Starliner spacecraft'but would return in a SpaceX-built Crew Dragon. After this interview, a Danish astronaut named Andreas Mogensen asserted that Musk was lying. "What a lie," Mogensen wrote on the social media site Musk owns, X. "And from someone who complains about lack of honesty from the mainstream media." Musk offered a caustic response to Mogensen. "You are fully retarded," Musk wrote. "SpaceX could have brought them back several months ago. I OFFERED THIS DIRECTLY to the Biden administration and they refused. Return WAS pushed back for political reasons. Idiot."...
Donald Trump's approach to Russia's invasion of Ukraine has always been to root for Russia while pretending he isn't. Trump just hates killing and death. More than that, he hates sending American money overseas. The claim that he actually agrees with Moscow is a hoax, remember. Trump is all about putting America first. Or so he's said, and so his mostly non-Russophilic supporters claim to believe. But now he has flung the mask to the ground. The president's latest positions on the war reveal that he is indifferent to ongoing slaughter'indeed, he is willing to increase it'and that his opposition to Ukraine's independence has nothing to do with saving American tax dollars. Trump simply wants Russia to win. In recent days, Trump has said he is 'looking at' a plan to revoke the temporary legal status of Ukrainians who fled to the United States. After Ukraine expressed willingness to sign away a large share of the proceeds from its natural-resource sales (in return for nothing), Trump said that might not be enough to restore support. Trump is now pushing Ukraine's president to step down and hold elections, according to NBC. Volodymyr Zelensky's domestic approval rating sits at 67 percent, and his most viable opponents have said that they oppose elections at the present time. The notion that Trump actually cares about democracy, and would downgrade his relations with a foreign country over its failure to meet his high governance standards, is so laughable that even a Trump loyalist like Sean Hannity would have trouble saying it with a straight face....