Social media and tech firm Meta has opened up its artificial intelligence model Llama to the United States military and defense contractors for national security purposes.
Llama will be used to streamline complicated logistics and planning, track terrorist financing and strengthen America’s cyber defenses, Meta’s president of global affairs Nick Clegg wrote in a Nov. 4 statement.
The firm will be partnering with Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, Oracle, Palantir and other tech heavyweights to offer full-scale services to the US government.
Mark Zuckerberg’s firm stressed the importance of the US and its allies continuing to champion open-source technologies to maintain its “technological edge” over China and other competitors.
“Open source systems have been critical to helping the United States build the most technologically advanced military in the world and, in partnership with its allies.”
Clegg noted that open-source systems have helped accelerate defense research and high-end computing, identify security vulnerabilities and improve communication.
“[It] benefits the public sector by enabling discoveries and breakthroughs, driving efficiency and improving delivery of public services.”
The US private sector would benefit massively, too, as national security is “inextricably linked” with economic output, Clegg said.
“Other nations – including China and other competitors of the United States – understand this as well, and are racing to develop their own open source models, investing heavily to leap ahead of the US.”
Mark Zuckerberg surfing while drinking and holding an American flag on America’s Independence Day. Source: Mark Zuckerberg
It came just days after Reuters reported that Chinese research institutions linked to the People’s Liberation Army had used an early version of Meta’s Llama to build its AI military tools to gather and process intelligence, citing a report it obtained.
In response, a Meta executive said the People’s Liberation Army’s apparent use of Llama is “unauthorized” and runs contrary to the Meta’s acceptable use policy.
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Under the new multi-company partnership, Oracle will build on Llama to synthesize aircraft maintenance documents so technicians can more efficiently diagnose problems — speeding up repair time to put the aircraft back in service.
Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure will host Llama on their cloud solutions to secure sensitive data
Aerospace firm Lockheed Martin has incorporated Llama into its “AI Factory” to process and conduct data analyses, while Scale AI is “fine-tuning” Llama to support specific national defense missions, such as planning operations and identifying adversary vulnerabilities.
Accenture, Anduril, Booz Allen, Databricks, Deloitte, Leidos and Snowflake are also involved.
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