Peter's Quasi-Daily Blah-g

Elon Musk is only one week into his role in President Donald Trump’s new administration, but the US federal government is already rolling out the Twitter playbook to manage its spending and personnel. Just like Musk did when he took over the social media platform, Trump’s team is attempting to drastically reduce the number of government staffers and ensure those who remain are loyal to the president’s agenda.

On Tuesday, federal employees received an email that mirrors the “Fork in the Road” missive sent to Twitter (now X) staff shortly after Musk bought the company in 2022. The email asks federal workers to resign by February 6 if they do not wish to return to the office five days a week and commit to a culture of excellence. Those who choose to resign will continue to get pay and benefits until September, according to the memo.

“The federal workforce should be comprised of employees who are reliable, loyal, trustworthy, and who strive for excellence in their daily work,” reads the email, which was later published on the US Office of Personnel Management website. “Employees will be subject to enhanced standards of suitability and conduct as we move forward.”

The news comes as Musk’s minions take over the US Office of Personnel Management, which acts as a human resources department for the federal workforce. Elon Musk did not immediately respond to a request for comment from WIRED. The Office of Personnel Management also did not respond to a request for comment.

Musk and his advisors, including Trump’s newly appointed AI and crypto czar David Sacks, used a remarkably similar strategy at Twitter. About a week after the acquisition was complete, Musk laid off half the workforce. Sacks helped advise him on which teams and people would be cut.

About two weeks later, remaining employees received an email with the subject line “A Fork in the Road.” Musk said that they would need to be “extremely hardcore” in order to realize his vision for Twitter 2.0. This meant “working long hours at high intensity.” He noted that "only exceptional performance” would receive “a passing grade." Employees were asked to opt into this vision via a web form. Anyone who failed to do so by the following day would receive three months severance, Musk said. Thousands of Twitter employees would later sue, arguing that they were not paid their full severance. Musk ultimately was able to get the suit dismissed.

“We are all shaking our heads in disbelief at how familiar this all feels,” says Yao Yue, a former principal engineer at Twitter. “Except, the federal government and its employees have specific laws in terms of spending, hiring, and firing.”

In this case, federal employees are being asked to send an email with the word “Resign” in the subject line in the next 10 days. “Purging the federal government of dedicated career civil servants will have vast, unintended consequences that will cause chaos for the Americans who depend on a functioning federal government,” Everett Kelley, national president of the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union of federal workers, said in a statement. “This offer should not be viewed as voluntary. Between the flurry of anti-worker executive orders and policies, it is clear that the Trump administration’s goal is to turn the federal government into a toxic environment where workers cannot stay even if they want to.”

A powerful new open-source artificial intelligence model created by Chinese startup DeepSeek has shaken Silicon Valley over the past few days. Packed with cutting-edge capabilities and developed on a seemingly tiny budget, DeepSeek’s R1 is prompting talk of an impending upheaval in the tech industry.

To some people, DeepSeek’s rise signals that the US has lost its edge in AI. But a number of experts, including executives at companies that build and customize some of the world’s most powerful frontier AI models, say it’s a sign of a different kind of technological transition underway.

Instead of trying to create larger and larger models that require increasingly exorbitant amounts of computing resources, AI companies are now focusing more on developing advanced capabilities, like reasoning. That has created an opening for smaller, innovative startups such as DeepSeek that haven’t received billions of dollars in outside investment. “It’s a paradigm shift towards reasoning, and that will be much more democratized,” says Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks, a company that specializes in building and hosting custom AI models.

“It’s been clear for some time now that innovating and creating greater efficiencies—rather than just throwing unlimited compute at the problem—will spur the next round of technology breakthroughs,” says Nick Frosst, a cofounder of Cohere, a startup that builds frontier AI models. “This is a clarifying moment when people are realizing what’s long been obvious.”

Thousands of developers and AI enthusiasts flocked to DeepSeek’s website and its official app in recent days to try out the company’s latest model and shared examples of its sophisticated capabilities on social media. Shares in US tech firms, including the chipmaker Nvidia, fell in response on Monday as investors began to question the vast sums being poured into AI development.

DeepSeek’s technology was developed by a relatively small research lab in China that sprang out of one of the country’s best-performing quantitative hedge funds. A research paper posted online last December claims that its earlier DeepSeek-V3 large language model cost only $5.6 million to build, a fraction of the amount its competitors needed for similar projects. OpenAI has previously said that some of its models cost upwards of $100 million each. The latest models from OpenAI as well as Google, Anthropic, and Meta likely cost considerably more.

The performance and efficiency of DeepSeek’s models has already prompted talk of cost cutting at some big tech firms. One engineer at Meta, who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly, says the tech giant will most likely try to examine DeepSeek’s techniques to find ways to reduce its own expenditure on AI. “We believe open source models are driving a significant shift in the industry, and that’s going to bring the benefits of AI to everyone faster,” a spokesperson for Meta said in a statement. “We want the US to continue to be the leader in open source AI, not China, which is why Meta is developing open source AI with our Llama models which have been downloaded over 800 million times.”

Spacecraft powered by electric propulsion could soon be better protected against their own exhaust, thanks to new supercomputer simulations.

Electric propulsion is a more efficient alternative to traditional chemical rockets, and it’s being increasingly used on space missions, starting off with prototypes on NASA’s Deep Space 1 and the European Space Agency‘s SMART-1 in 1998 and 2003, respectively, and subsequently finding use on flagship science missions such as NASA’s Dawn and Psyche missions to the asteroid belt. There are even plans to use electric propulsion on NASA’s Lunar Gateway space station.

The idea behind electric propulsion is that an electric current ionizes (i.e. removes an electron from) atoms of a neutral gas, such as xenon or krypton, stored on board a spacecraft. The ionization process produces a cloud of ions and electrons. Then a principle called the Hall effect generates an electric field that accelerates the ions and electrons and channels them into a characteristically blue plume that emerges from the spacecraft at over 37,000 mph (60,000 kph). Hence an electric propulsion system is also referred to as an ion engine.

According to Sir Isaac Newton‘s third law of motion, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The plume of ions jetting out from the spacecraft therefore acts to provide thrust. It takes a while to build up momentum, however, because, despite moving at high velocity, the ion plume is pretty sparse. The impulse generated is not as immediately forceful as a chemical rocket, but ion engines require less fuel and therefore less mass, which reduces launch costs, and ion engines don’t use up all their fuel as quickly as chemical rockets do.

Related: How an ion drive helped NASA’s Dawn probe visit dwarf planet Ceres

The energy for the electromagnetic fields is often provided by solar arrays, and hence the technology is sometimes referred to as solar electric propulsion. But for missions farther from the sun, where the sunlight is fainter, nuclear power in the form of radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) can also be used to drive the electric propulsion.

Though electric propulsion is now maturing and is being used in a variety of missions, it’s not a perfect technology. One problem in particular is that the ion plume can damage a spacecraft. Although the plume is pointed away from the probe, electrons in the plume can find themselves redirected, moving against the plume’s direction of travel and impacting the spacecraft, damaging solar arrays, communication antennas and any other exposed components. Suffice to say, this isn’t good for the probe.

"For missions that could last years, [electric propulsion] thrusters must operate smoothly and consistently over long periods of time," Chen Cui of the University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science said in a statement.

Before solutions can be put in place to protect a spacecraft from these backscattered electrons, their behavior in an ion-engine plume must first be understood, which is where Cui and Joseph Wang of the University of Southern California come in. They’ve performed supercomputer simulations of an ion engine’s exhaust, modeling the thermodynamic behavior of the electrons and how they affect the overall characteristics of the plume.

"These particles may be small, but their movement and energy play an important role in determining the macroscopic dynamics of the plume emitted from the electric propulsion thruster," said Cui.

What Cui and Wang found was that the electrons in the plume behave differently depending upon their temperature and their velocity.

"The electrons are a lot like marbles packed into a tube," said Cui. "Inside the beam, the electrons are hot and move fast. Their temperature doesn’t change much if you go along the beam direction. However, if the ‘marbles’ roll out from the middle of the tube, they start to cool down. This cooling happens more in a certain direction, the direction perpendicular to the beam’s direction."

In other words, the electrons in the core of the beam that are moving fastest have a more or less constant temperature, but those on the outside cool off faster, slow down and move out of the beam, potentially being back-scattered and impacting the spacecraft.

Now that scientists better understand the behavior of the electrons in the ion plume, they can incorporate this into designs for future electric propulsion engines, looking for ways to limit the back-scatter, or perhaps confine the electrons more to the core of the beam. Ultimately, this could help missions powered by electric propulsion to fly farther and for longer, pushed by the gentle blue breeze of its ion plume.

OpenAI is reportedly preparing for the launch of Operator sometime this week. Operator is name of its computer-use agent that can complete tasks in a user’s web browser on their behalf. Other companies including Google and Anthropic have been developing similar “agents” in hopes they will be the next major leap towards AI fulfilling its promise of being able to perform tasks currently done by humans.

According to The Information, which first reported on the impending launch, Operator will provide users with suggested prompts in categories like travel and dining and events. Users could, for instance, ask Operator to find a good flight from New York to Maui that would not have them landing too late in the evening. Operator will not complete a transaction—the user will remain in the loop and complete the checkout process.

It is easy to imagine certain ways Operator could be useful. Aging individuals who are not computer savvy could potentially ask Operator to help them send an email, and see it navigate to Gmail and open a compose window for them. Tech savvy people do not need this type of help, but older generators often struggle navigating the web and completing even simple tasks is a challenge. Bots could help in other areas as well, such as in quality-assurance testing where companies need to test that their new websites or services work properly.

So-called “computer use agents” do come with potential risks. We have already seen a startup introduce a web-navigating bot to automate the process of posting marketing spam to Reddit. Bots that take control of the end-user client are able to bypass API limitations meant to block automation. AI startups will need to take some measures to combat abuse, or else websites will become even more flooded with spam than they are today.

These agents like Operator essentially work by taking screenshots of a user’s browser and sending the images back to OpenAI for analysis. Once its models determine the next step necessary to complete a task, a command is sent back to the browser to move and click the mouse on the appropriate target, or type into an input box. It takes advantage of multi-modal technology OpenAI and others have been developing that can interpret multiple forms of input, in this case text and imagery.

The entire promise of a recent crop of AI startups is that they will be able to create an artificial general intelligence (AGI) that can replace humans on most tasks they perform today and make everyone’s lives more efficient. As exponential gains in the performance of language models have slowed, these companies have been looking for new unlocks that will get them there, and computer use agents are one. An artificial intelligence can not truly replace humans until it can physically complete the tasks for them—writing is just part of a task. Bots also need to be able to navigate spreadsheets, watch videos, and more.

After Anthropic released an initial preview of its computer use bot, early testers complained it was half-baked at best, getting stuck in loops when it does not know what to do or forgetting the task and starting to do something else entirely, like looking at pictures of nature on Google Images. It is also slow, and expensive to operate.

Keeping humans in the loop will be essential with a bot that is granted such high-level control and access to critical data. It seems like perhaps computer-use agents will be akin to self-driving cars. Google was able to make a car drive down a straightaway on its own easy enough, but the edge-case scenarios have taken years to solve.

There is debate on how to measure AGI and when it will be “achieved,” but OpenAI has told its biggest backer Microsoft that it believes AGI will be reached once it has created an AI that can generate at least $100 billion in profit. That is a lofty goal considering OpenAI predicts it will generate $12 billion in revenue in 2025 while still losing billions.

At the same time, neither Microsoft nor Google has seen enterprise customers willing to adopt AI tools as fast as they hoped. Instead of charging $20-30 per employee to add AI tools into their bundles, both companies are now shoving AI into their standard bundles and hiking the prices by a couple of dollars respectively.

California-based Vast Space has big ambitions. The company is aiming to launch a commercial space station, the Haven-2, into low Earth orbit by 2028, which would allow astronauts to stay in space after the decommissioning of the International Space Station (ISS) in 2030. In doing so, it is attempting to muscle in on NASA’s plans to develop commercial low-orbit space stations with partner organizations—but most ambitious of all are Vast Space’s goals for what it will eventually put into space: a station that has its own artificial gravity.

“We know that in weightlessness we can live a year or so, and in conditions that are not easy. Perhaps, however, lunar or Martian gravity is enough to live comfortably for a lifetime. The only way to find out is to build stations with artificial gravity, which is our long-term goal,” says Max Haot, Vast’s CEO.

Vast Space was founded in 2021 by 49-year-old programmer and businessman Jed McCaleb, the creator of the peer-to-peer networks eDonkey and Overnet, as well as the early and now defunct crypto exchange Mt. Gox. Vast Space announced in mid-December a partnership with SpaceX to launch two missions to the ISS, which will be milestones in the company’s plan to launch its first space station, Haven-1, later in 2025. The missions, still without official launch dates, will fall within NASA’s private astronaut missions program, through which the space agency wants to promote the development of a space economy in low Earth orbit.

For Vast, this is part of a long-term business strategy. “Building an outpost that artificially mimics gravity will take 10 to 20 years, as well as an amount of money that we don’t have now,” Haot admits. “However, to win the most important contract in the space station market, which is the replacement of ISS, with our founder’s resources, we will launch four people on a [SpaceX] Dragon in 2025. They will stay aboard Haven-1 for two weeks, then return safely, demonstrating to NASA our capability before any competitor.”

Space for One More?

What Vast Space is trying to do, by showing its capabilities, is get involved in NASA’s Commercial Destinations in Low Earth Orbit (CLD) program, a project the space agency inaugurated in 2021 with a $415 million grant to support the development of private low-Earth orbit stations.

The money was initially allocated to three different projects: one from aerospace and defense company Northrop Grumman, which has since exited the progam; a joint venture called Starlab; and Orbital Reef, from Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin. Vast has no contract with the US space agency, but it aims to outstrip its competitors by showing NASA that it can put a space station into space ahead of these others. The agency will choose which project’s station to back in the second half of 2026.

By doing this, Vast is borrowing from SpaceX’s playbook. Not only has Vast Space drawn some of its employees and the design of equipment and vehicles from Elon Musk’s company, it’s also trying to replicate its approach to market: to be ready before anyone else, by having technologies and processes already qualified and validated in orbit. “We are lagging behind,” Haot says. “What can we do to win? Our answer, in the second half of 2025, will be the launch of Haven-1.”

Haven-1 will have a habitable volume of 45 cubic meters, a docking port, a corridor with consumable resources for the crew’s personal living quarters, a laboratory, and a deployable communal table set up next to a domed window about a meter high. On board, roughly 425 kilometers above Earth’s surface, the station will use Starlink laser links to communicate with satellites in low Earth orbit, tech that was first tested during the Polaris Dawn mission in the autumn of 2024.