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by thinkr42 3422 days ago
Byzantine hiring processes in the government itself doesn't help this problem. This isn't a politica statement, if you compare USAJobs to an average tech company you'll see an over emphasis on certifications and the like. There are reasons for it, but it doesn't help when decision makers or project managers don't know what real success looks like or how to even measure it.
2 comments

I'm not sure that is a problem...historically the department of Energy (DOE) has lead Supercomputing efforts in the USA and they have focused on other domains of interest (particularly nuclear weapons research). This field is actually not unrelated, in terms of HPC capabilities, Numerical linear algebra, etc to the recent AI work. But physical simulation remains the top priority in part because AI is not seen as an energy technology.

I can state without hesitation that some of the greatest minds in Supercomputing and computational science are permanent members of the staff at these DOE research labs. These staff are selected much like the top AI researchers: academic pedigree and publications in top tier research journals.

Therefore, I think it is more a problem of application. Until government has a killer AI app, it will be hard to justify a massive investment in AI tech at scale. Contrast that with large companies who have already deployed AI tech in production...