I personally welcome cooperation with the Pentagon for OpenAI and other American companies. The disdain that seems to infest so many when it comes to working with our national defense organizations is both annoying and bewilderingly naive and that's even when we take into consideration all of the bad things that happen.
Strengthening partnerships with our government certainly doesn't make me mistrust OpenAI.
Yeah I understand skepticism over the USE of our military, but being categorically against our military having expanded military capabilities is just intentionally weakening ourselves. It's like saying our soldiers in Iraq shouldn't have had modern rifles because the invasion of Iraq was wrong.
I can only surmise that Silicon Valley has a sizeable contingent raised by hippie Vietnam protestors that produced a generational vibe of "military bad".
We only directly applied napalm to the skin of a couple thousand children, what are those stinky hippies still whining about? They saw the USS Maddox get attacked twice while performing peaceful maneuvers in our own backyard, the Gulf of Tonkin! We only dropped 21,000,000 gallons of Agent Orange, it hardly causes birth defects any more, only a few hundred writhing harlequin babies a year at this point, what exactly is the fucking problem?!
I wish the gunshots came after formal declarations of war by Congress, something that hasn't happened since before the current and previous Presidents were born.
Also wish Congress wasn't a clown car perpetually headed off a cliff.
But the Department of War became the Department of Defense, so I guess all these gun shots aren't war anymore.
And as for the gun analogy, I'm reminded of the "production for use"[0] defense from Howard Hawks's His Girl Friday:
"And so, into this little tortured mind came the idea that that gun had been produced for use. And use it he did."
Congress being a clown car is problem #1 for sure. Though congress unfortunately is at least somewhat or perhaps majorly representative of the will of the people so the problem is mostly that we're idiots.
I hear you on the need for a declaration of war, but as I'm sure you realize, it's not practical for most of the modern conflicts we find ourselves in. Congress has also explicitly given the Executive the power to conduct limited engagements because conflict develops much more quickly in many cases than Congress can act and we need to be able to respond quickly.
Now of course one might argue something such as that we shouldn't be in areas or be doing things that could instantly cause a conflict and of course that sounds great to me, but then after a second glance you realize that, well, for example Americans must get oil and gas from the Middle East and so here we are without a formal declaration of war protecting shipping lanes.
> It's like saying our soldiers in Iraq shouldn't have had modern rifles because the invasion of Iraq was wrong
TBF if the US military don't have modern rifles/equipments they will certainly not invade Iraq. So yes, having significantly better weapons does increase the chance of war because it increase your chance of winning (thus make it more politically feasible for politicians to push for it).
> It's like saying our soldiers in Iraq shouldn't have had modern rifles because the invasion of Iraq was wrong.
Is that argument wrong? Over the past few decades US military adventurism has been, on the whole, harmful to both the US and the rest of the world. Having "expanded military capabilities" seems to have done the US more harm than good, even ignoring the opportunity costs of spending on those military capabilities rather than more productive things.
Well, history is certainly written by the victors eh? The military is a tool used to maintain the empire of an unsustainable culture of consumption. This military is KILLING people in Yemen (a country with which the US is NOT at war) because they are delaying shipments of stuff. Stuff getting from a to b on time and for cheap is worth more than human life.
Go live as a civilian in a country that our military has decimated with bombs and then say again that "military bad" is just a vibe.
Yep, this is the naive rhetoric the GP was talking about. It’s totally okay for Houthis to lob missiles at American boats with American citizens on it and doing anything but letting them do so is “imperialism.”
Is this serious? Like literally one of the things the US navy does is provide protection to ships flying the US flag. That’s literally one of the main things the navy does in peacetime. Remember the Somali pirates? These are ships traveling through international waters being attacked - what other response would make sense?
As for their aims, you can believe it’s about Palestine but that seems more pretextual. Historically the Houthi’s have been extremely anti Saudia Arabia and the normalization talks with Israel pose a substantial threat to them and Iranians (not to mention the US historically is allied with Saudia Arabia). It’s possible that this is just retaliation for all of that but some believe that this is their attempt to draw in the US and UK into another middle eastern war which works further weaken them which is beneficial for the Iranian/Russia/China interests to establish a new world order.
It's a little odd to talk about "historical" Houthi trends since the founder of the movement was young enough to have almost certainly seen Die Hard. The Houthi movement was created to replicate the Iranian Revolution on the Arabian Peninsula, and borrows its slogal from Iran, including "Death to Israel, a Curse On The Jews". One of the very first things the Houthis did after taking over their stronghold of Sada'ah was to eject the remaining Yemeni Jewish residents. Houthi antipathy towards Israel isn't an elaborate geopolitical issue; they are foundationally an anti-semitic movement.
Moving a step away from facts towards analysis: the Houthis are widely considered to be an arm of the IRGC (the IRGC counts them in their "axis of resistance"). The Houthi/Saudi war seems to have been instigated in large part by Iran, whose long term conflict with Saudi Arabia is probably the most salient in MENA.
It probably doesn't make much sense to talk about what set of concessions would get the Houthis to stop; they've attacked ships indiscriminately, and have been doing so long before October 7.
Yeah for sure. Concessions also don’t work when they’re perceived as a weakness which tends to culturally be true in the Middle East.
The only thing I’ll note is that groups can have multiple goals. While destruction of Jews/Israel may be a rallying call and was a founding principle, Houthis can want other things and do have other enemies (Saudia Arabia is disliked by Houthis independently of Iran’s conflict with them).
> I can only surmise that Silicon Valley has a sizeable contingent raised by hippie Vietnam protestors that produced a generational vibe of "military bad".
You really think that's the only and most likely explanation?
This criticism is coming from the people being asked to make the weapons. Just because one isn't against the military having expanded capabilities, doesn't mean that one wants to spend their time creating things used to kill people.
> The disdain that seems to infest so many when it comes to working with our national defense organizations is both annoying and bewilderingly naive and that's even when we take into consideration all of the bad things that happen.
I think yor phrase "our national defense organizations" summarizes the counterargument: a lot of readers/commenters on HN live in other countries.
To counter this polemic comment with a more serious one: the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq after the 9/11 attacks was a central watershed moment in history that lead to a massive shift in the public opinion concerning the US military politics in many countries (and has stayed quite critical of it since then) - including lots of allies of the USA.
> To counter this polemic comment with a more serious one: the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq after the 9/11 attacks was a central watershed moment in history that lead to a massive shift in the public opinion concerning the US military politics in many countries (and has stayed quite critical of it since then) - including lots of allies of the USA.
Nice try, but no. Iraq was bullshit, and even we protested it ourselves, but Afghanistan had the support of basically the entire world. Many of those allies you claim don't value our military anymore pee themselves a little at the thought of being left to fend for themselves by us leaving NATO and ceasing to massively subsidize their defense (e.g., the wailing and gnashing when Donald Trump was threatening to take us out of NATO).
Indeed. Iraq was a case of the nation being conned by evil men (Cheney and Rumsfeld). We tried our DAMNDEST to prevent that war. Biggest protests in America ever. Did nothing.
Europe is now in its second, third? year of seeing what life without Uncle Sam would be like. Peaceful Lithuanian and Polish villages filled with the corpses of raped girls.
The military is important and software engineers need to read more of the news from the last 2 years in detail to understand that we’re still the good guys.
> Europe is now in its second, third? year of seeing what life without Uncle Sam would be like. Peaceful Lithuanian and Polish villages filled with the corpses of raped girls.
The US has a fascist running for president right now(who was previously elected!). There is every reason to be worried about new tech adoption by the US military.
Good point. I’d be careful even writing that, because that same potentially future president might do some Xi Jinping on you with the help of OpenAI - some psychological profiling to find the people who are a threat to his mental model. You just never know… but if he could do that, you can be damn sure he would. Which means if it’s not him that does it, it is just a matter of time before the next reality TV, possibly Russian planted president does it.
The world is gearing up for WWIII, I can smell it in the air. Maybe GPT5 has figured out there’s some serious dosh to be made!
He was elected in 2016 thanks to such online psychological profiling tools (CA).
The PATRIOT act will make it unstoppable. You all have already put enough online to deserve to be purged (murdered) in the eyes of some 2025 Cultural Revolutionary Red Guards.
Current administration has designated anyone that flew in and out of DC around Jan 6 as a potential terrorist, subject to extensive checks every single time they board a plane. with some some people being followed by federal air Marshalls from their home and to the airport.
Then you will be pleased to learn that the US military takes an oath to the Constitution, not to whoever happens to be the current President. Exactly because the dangers of assholes assuming the Presidency isn't some kind of genius insight that you're the first person to ever consider.
I just don't have faith in US political and cultural stability anymore, and as such I don't have faith that the constitution will be upheld, or even that the US will remain allied to Europe, where I live(though I wouldn't go as far as saying it's unlikely. Just wouldn't bet on it).
Also, the US constitution clearly has very little direct say on the actions of the US military abroad, as history has demonstrated.
> I just don't have faith in US political and cultural stability anymore, and as such I don't have faith that the constitution will be upheld . . . .
You can have faith or lack thereof in whatever you want, but I would like you to provide one single example in history where the President decided to give the military unconstitutional orders (as in legally acknowledged at the time to be unconstitutional, not "I don't like it so it's unconstitutional") and the US military sided with him instead of the Constitution.
But even American companies have offices abroad especially as they get big (not OpenAI yet but if they get big enough surely). Eg deepmind is based in the UK. Is it surprising to you that people from other countries might be wary of strengthening the US military at all costs?
Also, we know that the US military frequently uses its powers to maintain its global hegemony and the influence of US corporations abroad. This can be beneficial (more stable world order with fewer conflicts) but can be harmful (if the US decides to overthrow your government to protect its interests or the interests of the powerful within the US, bye bye)
There are a lot of companies that probably don’t have “official” partnerships with the govt but absolutely help them, like every social media company, OS maker, telecom, auto maker, and ISP.
I think the Pentagon cooperation with Boeing is the real cause of Boeing's rot, so this is a partnership that is bad for openAI's engineering and science over a longer term.
The incentives switch from making good and useful stuff to getting more military contracts
I think that's just another symptom. My theory is that Boeing is another engineering company that was overtook by MBAs.
10+ years ago I was working for a company acquired by Boeing (Jeppesen) and it was already a massive shitshow. Cost cutting everywhere but weirdly enough there were always money for some dumb initiative some highly placed and connected VP/Director had. None of those in my opinion led to an improvement in products, working efficiency, or any meaningful metric.
Sorry for being salty. Nowadays I feel I am going through the same st my current company and so this hits closer than I like.
I think the problem is that US "Defense" seems to involve a lot of foreign wars and "police actions" in countries that pose no conceivable threat to the USA.
The thing we all dread is AI-driven drones carrying out extra-judicial killings to promote US commercial interests in other countries. So far there seems to be nothing preventing this except the unwillingness of AI companies to co-operate with the "defense" industry. That apparently is no longer the case.
Unwillingness of AI companies was never a concern or a blocker. Some companies may say they are unwilling, but there are plenty of engineers and corps that are very much willing.
Strengthening partnerships with our government certainly doesn't make me mistrust OpenAI.