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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Are FFRDC projects returning — either getting g new ones or turning old ones back on?[/quote]

RAND is still way down on sales for all of their FFRDCs.[/quote]

Business is fine at RAND.[/quote]

Rand Corp is still hiring…..

https://rand.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/External_Career_Site/[/quote]

Not so much. 10 research jobs, of which 8 are AI, one is on China stuff, and one is for a management slot that may also be filled internally.  No big open “economist” or “engineer” positions, like in better times. [/quote]

Most of these jobs are 1-year contract positions in GER which has a lot of non-phds who are cosplaying as researchers by writing opinion pieces.
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I'm sorry they're failing to meet your normal RAND standards for lit reviews and Stata code. [/quote]

I'm sorry that all of your reports have to be turned into "expert insights" because nobody will sign-off on them.[/quote]

Not mine. I had a lot of issues with RAND, so I'm not there. See how that goes? You, too, could do that if you had external options. [/quote]

In better times, GER would be an amusement, a collection of navel-gazing coders who cannot compose the English language and so invented a next-word predictor that could - then marketed it as a super-intelligent force that will take over the planet and use humans for fuel. 
Unfortunately, GER has virtually nothing to do with what RAND provides at core and placing it in the dominant position it now occupies provides little more than charge codes for a few legacy staff and paid intellectual masturbation for a new cadre of coders who could not find real work in commercial industry or as SETAs. I am not surprised that they use the unearned gravitas of being a RAND researcher to publish idiotic commentaries.
I can vouch for the ridiculously poor quality of the resulting GER products - the outcomes upon which RAND relies to maintain its integrity. Crap. 
As for AI being the future, that is hard to argue with. I will declare emphatically that large language models and all the rainbow of flavors erupting from the ass thereof including retrieval augmented generators and LLM-based coding tools are most definitely not the future. Resources should be devoted to re-purposing data centers as skating rinks and homeless shelters. The cult that has grown from the posturing of scores of venture capitalists makes Elizabeth Holmes look like the Pope. No, artificial general intelligence is not around the corner. No, artificial neural networks are not the medium for AGI. No, looking for some practical way to make money from LLMs will not recover the investment. Yes, the current crop of students and researchers leveraging LLMs instead of doing the actual work degrades the net human intellectual capacity of any given field going forward - especially given the perception of near-term savings in time and resources.

It is artificial stupidity.

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If RAND research is so well-respected that someone would want to steal your valor, and you hate it so much there, why are you still there?[/quote]

Jason is purging all the legacy staff for GER fellows.[/quote]

All the more reason to preemptively get out.[/quote]

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