The internet posts and side projects of Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) worker Jordan Wick could give some clues for how Musk’s efficiency group might attempt to use AI to downsize and retool the government.
After graduating from MIT in 2020 and working at the self-driving car company Waymo, Wick cofounded (with ex-Palantir employee Anthony Jancso) Accelerate SF, which put on hackathons looking for ways to use large language models to improve local government services in San Francisco. In 2024, Accelerate SF renamed itself AccelerateX and began courting federal agency contracts with its own “modern OS for government.” A recruiting post on X said the company hopes to use AI to reduce expenditures, automate tedious work, and help interpret government policy language.
AccelerateX claimed last May that it already had contracts with “two of the largest transportation agencies in America,” but a search for the company’s name in the federal procurement database came up empty. Those contracts could be with local or state governments. (AccelerateX did not respond to Fast Company’s request for comment.)
One key challenge of using AI tools to streamline the government is that they must be deftly integrated into existing mission-critical systems—some of them old and brittle like the COBOL-coded mainframe systems used to process Social Security payments. Any interruption to those legacy systems could deprive millions of people of benefits they depend on to live. And there are many such systems active in the government.
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