OpenAi said Monday The US Department of Defense has granted a contract for a maximum of $ 200 million to help the agency identify and build prototypes systems that use its frontier models for administrative tasks and more.
OpenAI offers some examples of possible task, such as helping service members to get health care, streaming data on various programs and “to support” proactive cyber defense “. The company also said that “all use cases should be consistent with the user policy and the guidelines of OpenAi.”
The Dod’s announcement Uses slightly more simple formulation. It says: “According to this prize, the Prototype -Border AI options will develop to tackle critical national security challenges in both war fights and business areas.”
Whether this reference to war fights applies to the weapons themselves or only other areas related to wars, such as paperwork, is still to be seen. The Guidelines of OpenAI prohibit individual users to use chatgpt or are APIs to develop or use weapons. However, OpenAi has removed the explicit prohibitions of ‘military and warfare’ in its service conditions in January 2024.
Given how heavy some powerful people in Silicon Valley have warned about the dangers of the advanced LLM models from China, it is not surprising that the Dod OpenAi wants to use for any purposes. Marc Andreessen, co-founder of VC company Andreessen Horowitz, an OpenAI investor, recently appeared on Jack Altman’s Podcast (Jack is Sam Altman’s brother). Andreessen described the race between the AI of China and The models of the Western world as a ‘cold war’.
Yet it is perhaps an equally interesting part of this announcement what it says about the increasingly tense relationship of OpenAi with his most important investor Microsoft.
Microsoft has thousands of contracts With the federal government worth hundreds of millions of dollars. It has been implementing the strict security protocols that are needed for the government – especially the DOD – to use its cloud for decades.
OpenAi has announced this deal as part of its broader new ‘OpenAI for Government’ program, which consolidates a number of other programs that it uses to sell councils directly to government agencies, including the US National Labs, the Air Force Research Laboratory, NASA, NIH and the Treasury, according to the company.
But it was only in April that Microsoft announced The Dod had approved its Azure OpenAi service for all classified levels. Now the Dod also goes directly to the source. From the perspective of Microsoft: Ouch.
Neither Openai nor Microsoft immediately responded to a request for comments.
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