“We want our government to be something we can trust, unlike something that is on the absolute bleeding edge,” says Etzioni. “We don't need to be bureaucratic and slow, but if companies have not yet taken over, is the government really where we want to experiment with the advanced AI?”
Etzioni says that AI agents are not a great 1-1 fits for replacing jobs. On the contrary, AI is able to perform certain tasks or to make others more efficient, but the idea that the technology could do the jobs of 70,000 employees would not be possible. “Unless you use funny mathematics,” he says, “no way.”
Jancso, first identified by Wired in February, was one of the first recruiters for Doge in the months before Donald Trump was inaugurated. In December, Jancso, who told Wired to Wired that he had been recruited by Steve Davis, president of the Musk-Found boring company and a current member of Doge, used the Palantir Alumni Group to recruit doge members. On December 2, 2024, he wrote: “I help the team of Elon Technical Talent to find the Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) in the new Admin. This is a historical opportunity to build up an efficient government and to reduce the federal budget with 1/3. If you are interested in playing a role in this mission, take a role in this mission.”
According to a source in SpaceX, who asked to stay anonymous because they are not authorized to talk to the press, Jancso seemed to be one of the doge members who worked together with various other people from the DC office of the company in the days before the inauguration. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.
Palantir was co -founder by Peter Thiel, a billionaire and old Trump supporter with narrow ties with Musk. Palantir, which provides data analysis tools to various government agencies, including the Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Interior Security, has received billions of dollars in government contracts. During the second Trump administration, the company was involved in building a “Mega API” to connect data from the Internal Revenue Service with other government agencies and collaborates with immigration and customs enforcement to create an enormous surveillance platform to identify immigrants to focus on deportation.
This story originally appeared on Wired.com.
