OpenAI mentioned Monday the U.S. Division of Protection granted it a contract for as much as $200 million to assist the company establish and construct prototype methods that use its frontier fashions for administrative duties and extra.
OpenAI supplies a couple of examples of doable tasking, corresponding to serving to service members get healthcare, streamlining information on varied applications, and “supporting proactive cyber protection.” The corporate additionally mentioned that “All use circumstances have to be in keeping with OpenAI’s utilization insurance policies and tips.”
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 important 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 tips do forbid particular person customers to make use of ChatGPT or its APIs to develop or use weapons. Nonetheless, OpenAI deleted the specific prohibitions of “navy and warfare” in its phrases of service again in January, 2024.
Given how closely some highly effective individuals in Silicon Valley have warned of the hazards of China’s superior LLM fashions, it’s not shocking the DoD desires to make use of OpenAI for no matter functions it desires. As an example, Marc Andreessen, co-founder of VC agency Andreessen Horowitz, an OpenAI investor, not too long ago appeared on Jack Altman’s “Uncapped” podcast (brother of Sam Altman). Andreessen described the race between China’s AI and the western world’s models as a “cold war.”
Nonetheless, maybe an equally attention-grabbing a part of this announcement is what it says about OpenAI’s increasingly strained relationship with its major investor Microsoft.
Microsoft has thousands of contracts with the federal authorities price a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of {dollars}. It has, for many years, been implementing the strict safety protocols vital 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 a lot of 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 response to the corporate.
But it surely was solely in April that Microsoft announced the DoD had authorized its Azure OpenAI Service for all labeled 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.
