The new ‘land grab’ for AI companies, from Meta to OpenAI, is military contracts

2 comments

1. “Silicon Valley AI companies have a new BFF: the U.S. Department of Defense.

   It’s a remarkable turn of events for the internet companies, who until very recently treated defense work as if it were taboo, if not outright verboten. But with the cost to develop and run generative AI services already totaling hundreds of billions of dollars, and showing no signs of slowing,

   The DoD, with its essentially unlimited budget and long standing interest in cutting-edge technology, suddenly doesn’t look so bad.

   An embrace of military work may indeed suit the political moment well, with a business-friendly Trump administration set to take office in January,

   and a cohort of hawkish Silicon Valley insiders, led by “First Buddy” Elon Musk, in the president elect’s inner circle.

   Musk’s mandate in his official role as co-head of the new Department of Government Efficiency is to sharply curtail spending.

   But few expect the Pentagon’s budget to see serious cutbacks, particularly when it comes to AI at a time when the U.S. and China are locked in battle for AI supremacy.

   Google’s “AI principles” now stipulate that it will “not pursue… weapons or other technologies whose principal purpose or implementation is to cause or directly facilitate injury to people,” nor for “surveillance violating internationally accepted norms.”

   But the policy leaves plenty of wiggle room and the company has explicitly said it will not swear off working with the military entirely. “

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2. Of course. The DoD is littered with people that aren’t the most tech savvy but have billions of dollars to spend on programs that’ll probably never work as thought but we’ll keep sinking money into them.

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