OpenAI mentioned Monday the U.S. Division of Protection granted it a contract for as much as $200 million to assist the company determine and construct prototype methods that use its frontier fashions for administrative duties and extra.
OpenAI gives a couple of examples of doable tasking, similar to serving to service members get healthcare, streamlining knowledge on varied applications, and “supporting proactive cyber protection.” The corporate additionally mentioned that “All use instances should be in keeping with OpenAI’s utilization insurance policies and pointers.”
The DoD’s announcement used barely extra easy wording. It says, “Beneath this award, the performer will develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to deal with crucial nationwide safety challenges in each warfighting and enterprise domains.”
Whether or not that reference to war-fighting applies to the weapons themselves or simply different areas related to wars, like paperwork, stays to be seen. OpenAI’s pointers do forbid particular person customers to make use of ChatGPT or its APIs to develop or use weapons. Nevertheless, OpenAI deleted the specific prohibitions of “navy and warfare” in its phrases of service again in January, 2024.
Given how closely some highly effective folks in Silicon Valley have warned of the hazards of China’s superior LLM fashions, it’s not shocking the DoD needs to make use of OpenAI for no matter functions it needs. As an illustration, Marc Andreessen, co-founder of VC agency Andreessen Horowitz, an OpenAI investor, lately appeared on Jack Altman’s “Uncapped” podcast (brother of Sam Altman). Andreessen described the race between China’s AI and the western world’s fashions as a “chilly warfare.”
Nonetheless, maybe an equally fascinating a part of this announcement is what it says about OpenAI’s more and more strained relationship with its main investor Microsoft.
Microsoft has hundreds of contracts with the federal authorities price lots of of tens of millions of {dollars}. It has, for many years, been implementing the strict safety protocols crucial for the federal government – particularly the DoD – to make use of its cloud.
OpenAI introduced this deal as a part of its broader new “OpenAI for Authorities” program, which consolidates various different applications it makes use of to promote wares on to authorities companies, together with the U.S. Nationwide Labs, the Air Power Analysis Laboratory, NASA, NIH, and the Treasury, in keeping with the corporate.
Nevertheless it was solely in April that Microsoft introduced the DoD had accepted its Azure OpenAI Service for all categorized ranges. Now the DoD can also be going straight to the supply. From Microsoft’s perspective: ouch.
Neither OpenAI nor Microsoft instantly responded to a request for remark.
