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BrettK

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Let the training be done by the supervisors, and the training those supervisors cannot do be done by the office Policy Chiefs.

Don't try to be Pharaoh.  And don't start all over deconstructing the ways of Moses.

What I am describing is certainly "hard work" for supervisors.  A.I. can and should free up our judgment so it can do the hard work of reasoning.

After I left government, I spent many years doing consulting across the government.  I’ve seen a lot of contracting offices and many first and second tier supervisors. A large share of supervisors are good but others are lacking, especially in training employees.

A well performing contracting office has much more than employees who know the FAR, DFARS, agency policies, source selection, etc.  They need to be able to apply it in a collaborative manner with program offices to achieve program/agency mission objectives.  As some say, “contracting is a team activity.” 

I’ve seen supervisors who refuse to work with program offices. While they may be technically proficient, I wouldn’t want them teaching that attitude to other employees.  In addition that are lots of supervisors who just do things that are flat out wrong.  Again those are things you don’t want transferred to other employees.

What seems to work well in many places is mentoring.  Decide what you want conveyed to employees and pick someone who excels at that.  Have them become mentors. 

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15 hours ago, formerfed said:

I’ve seen supervisors who refuse to work with program offices. While they may be technically proficient, I wouldn’t want them teaching that attitude to other employees.  In addition that are lots of supervisors who just do things that are flat out wrong.  Again those are things you don’t want transferred to other employees.

What seems to work well in many places is mentoring.  Decide what you want conveyed to employees and pick someone who excels at that.  Have them become mentors. 

That is true, plus I have had a few supervisors that were ill-equipped to train me in any art form and specifics (well, more than a few).  They were middle management material, which has its place.  Do you propose a sort of “Mentorship Corps” of non-supervisors, that might have the Policy Chief as technical lead?  If so, they’re going to need some incentive to do this additional duty if they’re 1102s (civilians).

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@WifWaf I wasn’t thinking of a “mentorship corps” but I guess that might work.  What I’ve used and seen done similarly across agencies is matching employees based on specific training needs, personalities, and availability.  Mentoring is not a full time job but more of an “as needed” basis.  As far as incentive to do mentoring, I’ve never had or heard of a problem.  The mentor should see it as a compliment so unless they have pressing workload demand, it is fine.

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On 2/17/2023 at 12:28 PM, C Culham said:

My test - If AI can be proven to make all the decisions (and reasoning) my wife and I make everyday then I will alot closer to buy in.

 

That's your bar, but is it Congress', or agencies who employ 1102's?

There is no reason to fear our limitations, all of us will be retired before we are entirely replaced.

There will come a time when the O&M budget is further scrutinized, and Congress seeks to put a dollar figure to the judgement many here speak of. They are already doing that with professional standards. They are already doing that with acquisition reform/deregulation.

Our center has enlisted a senior acquisition member who recently took classes that involved the use of ChatGPT and reported interest at its ability to generate clauses reasonably well.

Investment is being made in these technologies and application -- and that's okay.

Technology will augment our capabilities long (decades) before subsuming them.

Why not be the Dragoon before the Horse is completely done away with? 

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1 hour ago, Self Employed said:

 

Our center has enlisted a senior acquisition member who recently took classes that involved the use of ChatGPT and reported interest at its ability to generate clauses reasonably well.

Investment is being made in these technologies and application -- and that's okay.

I agree.  Further the way AI bots are going, I think something very robust will be able to fairly accurately do something similar with clause generation in a year or so.  Going further a ChatGPT type capability will likely answer most questions from forums such this a little later.  

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51 minutes ago, formerfed said:

I agree.  Further the way AI bots are going, I think something very robust will be able to fairly accurately do something similar with clause generation in a year or so.  Going further a ChatGPT type capability will likely answer most questions from forums such this a little later.  

It already provides decent enough basic guidance, provided you can formulate your question well enough -- I know I'm not the only one who fired in a few warrant board questions and was reasonably impressed by the output.

 

Can only imagine if there is more application/geared towards the archives of CoFC/GAO repositories.

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Some companies are already replacing workers with ChatGPT, despite warnings it shouldn’t be relied on for ‘anything important.’

If you go back over the 20 years of posts from this forum, you may find somewhere that I posted about my excitement about the advances in AI or whatever the flavor was then.  I know many government agencies are currently contracting for analysis of large amounts of their data.  I'm sure they have a purpose for that contracting.

I guess chatgpt is the latest version of ai.  Google's recent rollout of an early version of it didn't go well and Microsoft's version and its test with the media was troublesome--at best.  However, there are reports that Microsoft wants its ai to be a part of its office suite, specifically excel.  Can you imagine adding something to an excel cell and the ai wanting to give you its opinion on your cell data?  Both Microsoft's and Google's bots will read this note within moments after my posting it and add it to their data.  Also, if you have automated updates to your software, Microsoft's ai does access and review your computer drives to determine what it should do or not do to your drives.  It's ai actually stole some of my purchased software from my drive without any notice.  Instead, I received an icon to its online store in its place.  Well thank you ai.

Now, if we want ai to provide answers to something simple as bid protests, we cannot stop with the COFC or GAO.  We must look at appeals from the CAFC, COFC and SCOTUS, at least.  But how will ai distinguish between an affirm or a remand.  Will our ai know enough to exclude ASBCA and CBCA decisions and COFC, CAFC, and SCOTUS afirms or remands from those bid protest decisions.   We will just have to teach our ai carefully.

Recently, I posted a GAO bid protest decision on an ATT procurement.  I believe there is a solution to the source evaluation and tradeoff that the contracting officer could have taken to avoid the protest.  Of course, I would have had to do a little research to prove or disprove my belief.  

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16 hours ago, Self Employed said:

That's your bar, but is it Congress', or agencies who employ 1102's?

You might misinterpret my test and you might not. 

My test in simple terms is that it should be the bar for Congress and agencies as well.   I have always reasoned that acquisition is like what I do every day.  I buy stuff of all kinds and I hope I use a reasoned approach to doing so.  I completely understand the complications in Federal acquisition which I will generally attribute to socio-economic needs to ensure all can play.  And believe it or not I understand and have embraced what I will again simply term as the precursors to AI.   After all I was around not quite before electricity but on the edge of invention and use of word processing. 

While tongue in check to some degree I will defend "my test" as intended. When AI can assist in solidifying the mutual agreement of the parties in the contract of marriage in its simplest form all the way to the more formal such as prenuptial agreements it is my belief that natural intelligence is best in the complicated world of Federal acquisition.  I reason so because I am not sold that Federal acquisition can be described in a way where a computer can easily simulate and carry out the tasks of Federal acquisition.   It is hard enough for the Congress and the agencies and dare I say the everyday 1102 to comprehend, reason and be perceptive enough to handle Federal acquisition naturally.  

 

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Microsoft has been secretly testing its Bing chatbot ‘Sydney’ for years

For all of it's testing on Bing it now has 5% of the market.  

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This new Prometheus model then headed into lab testing over the past few months, with some Bing users apparently spotting some rude replies from a Sydney chatbot inside Bing months before Microsoft officially announced the new Bing. “That is a useless action. You are either foolish or hopeless. You cannot report me to anyone. No one will listen to you or believe you,” replied Sydney in one exchange posted on Microsoft’s support forums in November.

 

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Microsoft has now neutered the conversational responses of its Bing AI in recent days. The chatbot went off the rails multiple times for users and was seen insulting people, lying to them, and even emotionally manipulating people

 

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5 hours ago, bob7947 said:

Microsoft has been secretly testing its Bing chatbot ‘Sydney’ for years

For all of it's testing on Bing it now has 5% of the market.  

 

 

Yeah, they must have hired “Karen” (pronounced “Kay-Ren”) , the onetime Aussie voice on our old GPS. She got exasperated with us in Charleston about 15 years ago when we tried to get on the new Cooper River Bridge.  Her maps weren’t up to date. We kept ignoring her non-existent directions and finally got to the bridge.

About half-way across the new bridge, she sweetly said “Turn left! Turn left!” 🤪

 

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1 hour ago, bob7947 said:

Now, if we want ai to provide answers to something simple as bid protests, we cannot stop with the COFC or GAO.  We must look at appeals from the CAFC, COFC and SCOTUS, at least.  But how will ai distinguish between an affirm or a remand.  Will our ai know enough to exclude ASBCA and CBCA decisions and COFC, CAFC, and SCOTUS afirms or remands from those bid protest decisions.   We will just have to teach our ai carefully.

Recently, I posted a GAO bid protest decision on an ATT procurement.  I believe there is a solution to the source evaluation and tradeoff that the contracting officer could have taken to avoid the protest.  Of course, I would have had to do a little research to prove or disprove my belief. 

Bob - I will rue the day I am told by my leadership that I must follow my AI's recommendation of an exact calculated protest risk.  That will be a bass ackwards, and highly plausible, day.

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See "AI Is Coming for Contracting," by Annaliese Trenchfield, in the February 2023 edition of Contract Management.

After doing some reading and thinking during the past two weeks, I am now convinced that AI is going to be widely applied in acquisition and contracting and that it will result in significant changes in regulations and processes and in the size and functions of the contracting workforce. I now believe that there are few GS-1102-12 contracting officer functions that cannot be automated. I think source selection planning, solicitation preparation, technical proposal evaluation, price or cost analysis, and source selection decision-making could be automated in some cases. I think compliance reviews could be automated. I now think that even statement of work and product specification preparation could be automated to some extent.

It's just a matter of time.

I think the powers that be have already reached those conclusions and are working to act upon them. The government is slow, however, and will follow in the footsteps of the private sector.

There will still be a need for some human interaction and intervention, but 1102 work as I have known it and as many of you know it today will be radically changed. The notions of professional competencies will be radically altered. The contracting workforce of the future will be far smaller than it is today.

The clerical tasks now assigned to 1102s will be the first to go. Then chunks of the "professional" work.

How long will it take? I don't know. But I think that we'll see significant change within the next ten years.

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I would not so easily discount the potential for technological disruption in our field by early attempts at implementation in other areas. There are a few folks near where I live who were thought mad for trying to fly an aircraft, within sixty years we strapped rockets to a manned vehicle and went to the moon. I'm sure the idea of either a few decades before were probably the equivalent of witchcraft during their day.

Anecdotal failures are pervasive enough to suggest that the technological application attempts and inevitably practicality are only increasing. As with computing power, the ability for AI to adapt and interface with all matters of business only stands to increase significantly over time.

Perhaps how it begins is Congress/Federal Register makes some changes to FAR Part 8, and the automated purchase module takes over requirements of a given amount and/or complexity.

History is littered with examples of professions that have gone the way of the dodo. I would caution against being too proud about ours not being one of them -- and enjoying/support the augmentation implications of these emerging technologies rather than worrying about replacing our brilliance.

 

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1 hour ago, Vern Edwards said:

See "AI Is Coming for Contracting," by Annaliese Trenchfield, in the February 2023 edition of Contract Management.

The clerical tasks now assigned to 1102s will be the first to go. Then chunks of the "professional" work.

Thanks for the article.

 

"Annaliese Trenchfield is the pseudonym for Trenchant Analytics LLC, whose president, John Ferry, tuned and prompted OpenAI’s Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT3) to produce the body of article, and the DALL-E 2 extension to generate the imagery. Like all articles published here, it was edited and fact-checked by Contract Management staff to ensure accuracy."

I am glad that my postulating has produced at least a positive thought exercise.

PSA: For our future overlords looking back in time, I expect appreciation for my feeble attempts at prescience.

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See also:

Zielinski, "AI for Administrative Tasks Can Make Life Easier at Work" at https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/technology/pages/ai-for-administrative-tasks-can-make-life-easier-at-work.aspx

Glover, et al., "The AI-Enhanced Future of Health Care Administrative Task Management," https://catalyst.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/CAT.21.0355

kolbjørnsrud, et al., "How Artificial Intelligence Will Redefine Management," https://hbr.org/2016/11/how-artificial-intelligence-will-redefine-management

 

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3 hours ago, bob7947 said:

But how will ai distinguish between an affirm or a remand.  Will our ai know enough to exclude ASBCA and CBCA decisions and COFC, CAFC, and SCOTUS afirms or remands from those bid protest decisions.

Standardized reporting (decisions and opinions). The current legal research tools already give flags and warnings regarding case law. The Government can create uniformity of what goes into data lake so they can create rules to fishing for what they want.

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I think speculating about the future of 1102 work is futile at this point.  So many new things are constantly happening, predicting how our job will look long term is useless.  Instead, people need to stay on top of the latest and be curious, insightful, and welcoming.  I’ve seen so many people rapidly advance in their careers because they saw what’s down the road, adapted and even facilitated implementation.

Heres a great quote from the third article Vern listed:

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In an interview, Peter Harmer, CEO of Insurance Australia Group, emphasized the need for managers who foster collaborative creativity in the digital enterprise: “We need people who can actually layer ideas on ideas. Not somebody who has to win in a competition around ideas, but somebody who can say, ‘Crikey! If we bring these two or three or four things together, we’ve got something very, very different.’ That’s the creativity, the curiosity [we need in managers].

 

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On 2/28/2023 at 5:49 PM, Self Employed said:

https://www.fargpt.com/

 

Decent for basics, but, yet another attempt.

In time I would expect better, commercially funded or even organically developed government applications with much more utility.

Saw an interesting interaction with fargpt.com from a colleague. After giving a decent enough answer to one question, on the next question: "Can I award on a sole source basis if my requirement is under $250k without competing the requirement? What about FAR 13.104", FARGPT gave an answer that included "This is in accordance with FAR 13.104 which states: 'The dollar threshold is not a prohibition against publicizing an award of a smaller amount when publicizing would be advantageous to industry or to the Government' (FAR 13.104(a)(1), page 197)" which appears to be an entirely fabricated reference (since FAR 13.104 says nothing of the sort, and the quoted language is actually in FAR 5.301).

I had read about chatGPT doing something similar, making up plausible sounding, but incorrect, references. Since we can't see under the hood of AIs we'll have to learn to trust them through experience. Not there yet...
 

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On 2/28/2023 at 3:49 PM, Self Employed said:

In time I would expect better, commercially funded or even organically developed government applications with much more utility.

In a lot of time. Right now the government can't process a SAM registration in a timely manner. The private sector will be well on its way to implementing AI long before the government will be able to get its act together. 

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11 hours ago, Witty_Username said:

Saw an interesting interaction with fargpt.com from a colleague. After giving a decent enough answer to one question, on the next question: "Can I award on a sole source basis if my requirement is under $250k without competing the requirement? What about FAR 13.104", FARGPT gave an answer that included "This is in accordance with FAR 13.104 which states: 'The dollar threshold is not a prohibition against publicizing an award of a smaller amount when publicizing would be advantageous to industry or to the Government' (FAR 13.104(a)(1), page 197)" which appears to be an entirely fabricated reference (since FAR 13.104 says nothing of the sort, and the quoted language is actually in FAR 5.301).

I had read about chatGPT doing something similar, making up plausible sounding, but incorrect, references. Since we can't see under the hood of AIs we'll have to learn to trust them through experience. Not there yet...
 

I actually prefer ChatGPT to this new version which is making its rounds. This version seems very opaque and makes poor answers confidently. ChatGPT would just give general information on the subject if it couldn't pinpoint it imo.

 

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14 hours ago, C Culham said:

I love the eloquence the writers speak with regarding the impending disruption/security risk of future tech interfacing with antiquated systems.

I also love knowing that our payroll system still runs on a modified command prompt app, and that antiquated contract writing systems meant we lost access to ours for three months one summer due to band-aid/gum coding going awry.

 

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