Meta's tech chief says it's time for Silicon Valley to embrace the military again

Meta recently announced a partnership with defense tech startup Anduril on a US military project.
Meta's CTO said the partnership is a "return to grace" for Silicon Valley's ties with the military.
Anduril said the project isn't funded by taxpayers and will save the military billions of dollars.
Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth said the social media giant's partnership with defence technology startup Anduril marks a "return to grace" for Silicon Valley's relationship with the military.
"The Valley was founded on a three-way investment between the military, academics, and private industry. That was the founding of it," Bosworth said during an interview at the Bloomberg Tech summit in San Francisco on Wednesday.
"There would be no technology if we weren't all tasked with the problem of keeping naval ballistic trajectories during the first two world wars. That is the heart and soul of the investment that led to what we are today, and that really got severed for a while there," he added.
Last week, Meta announced that it was partnering with Anduril to build next-gen extended reality gear for the US military. Anduril said in a statement on May 29 that the project will incorporate its AI-powered command and control system, Lattice, as well as technology from Meta's Reality Labs and Llama AI models.
"The effort has been funded through private capital, without taxpayer support, and is designed to save the US military billions of dollars by utilizing high-performance components and technology originally built for commercial use," Anduril said in its May statement.
Bosworth said on Wednesday that it was "way too early" to determine if the military would turn into a business segment for Meta.
"So far, it's like a zero. Let's start with one and go from there. I think there's no reason it couldn't be meaningful in the impact that it has," he continued.
Bosworth said partnering with Anduril doesn't mean Meta's becoming a defense contractor.
"They have got a system in a program. We are supplying them with parts. So everything we are doing is for consumers. We are developing technology with a target on consumer audiences," he said.
"It turns out a lot of that technology could be multi-use and that is really where I want to establish a partnership," he continued.
Bosworth isn't the only Silicon Valley executive who is looking to make inroads into the defense industry.
Last year, Google's former CEO and chairman, Eric Schmidt said he was working on a military drone startup with Udacity CEO Sebastian Thrun. Schmidt's startup, named White Stork, plans to mass-produce drones that can take out enemy targets using AI.
"Because of the way the system works, I am now a licensed arms dealer," Schmidt said in a lecture at Stanford University in April 2024. A video of the lecture was briefly posted on Stanford's YouTube channel in August before it was taken down.
Read the original article on Business Insider

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Learn with AIFact CheckingText to SpeechAI Summary

Related Articles

Yahoo

2 hours ago

• Yahoo

Meta's CFO describes her mortifying first day on the Morgan Stanley trading floor

Meta's CFO talked about what it was like starting at Morgan Stanley when she was 19 after graduating from college. Susan Li told the Stripe cofounder John Collison in a podcast interview that her age was spotlighted on her first day. She also talked about what she learned from working with former Morgan Stanley tech banker Michael Grimes. Her first day on Morgan Stanley's trading floor, Susan Li was "mortified." Li, who is now Meta's CFO, started at the bank around two decades ago when she was just 19, after graduating from Stanford sooner than most of her peers. "When I showed up at Morgan Stanley for my first day, I was on the trading floor in the big Broadway headquarters at 1585, and the equivalent of an HRBP basically got the attention of everyone on the trading floor," Li told Stripe cofounder John Collison on his podcast Cheeky Pint. "And so she wanted everyone on the floor to stop and look at me and know that no one was to serve me any alcohol at any company gathering." It was about par for the course for the industry, she added. "So it was exactly the way you think about beginning your career on Wall Street, by being mortified," she said. The Meta CFO talked about some of the potential pros and cons of advancing through the education system so quickly. "Well, some might say, because I started kindergarten when I was four and I graduated from college when I was 19, that having 15 years of formal education is — I'm woefully under-educated, as it were, so I'm really just having to make up for that rough start," Li said. She was able to sprint through her education, she added, in part because the institutions she attended noticed when students needed different challenges to keep them engaged. "I was in a school system that identified when kids were bored in school and then just gave you opportunities to keep moving ahead, and my parents always took them," she said. Li first joined Meta in 2008, eventually rising to the rank of CFO at 36 years old, making her one of the youngest chief financial officers in an industry where the average age of people in similar positions is 53. When Li finally entered the professional circuit as a banker, she said she worked with Michael Grimes, the former head of global technology investment banking at Morgan Stanley. Grimes is currently a senior official at the United States Department of Commerce. Li said she remembered Grimes' energetic nature and curiosity, as well as his ability to outwork anyone. "Grimes is extraordinarily, very high-energy — applies that to a whole host of things," Li said. "You go talk to Michael about tech companies, about banking, about parenting, about why there should be more undergraduate sales programs in colleges in the country. He's got a point of view on everything, and he's endlessly curious." Morgan Stanley and Meta did not respond to a request for comment by Business Insider prior to publication. Li added that Grimes's behavior served as a sort of model for her own. "He is going to outwork you and outlearn you. It's actually a pretty spectacular thing as a young person starting in your career to see what excellence at this looks like," Li said. Read the original article on Business Insider

Miami Herald

5 hours ago

• Miami Herald

OpenAI makes shocking move amid fierce competition, Microsoft problems

A blind man once told me, "I wish I knew what a beautiful woman looks like". He started losing his sight from birth and lost it completely while he was still just a child. What do the engineers trying to make artificial intelligence know about intelligence? To me, they look like a bunch of blind men, trying to build a "living" statue of a beautiful person. The worst part is, they don't even know they are blind. Do you remember the scandal when an engineer from Google claimed that the company's AI is sentient? When I saw the headlines, I didn't even open the articles, but my conclusion was that either Google made a terrible mistake in hiring him or it was an elaborate PR stunt. I thought Google was famous for having a high hiring bar, so I was leaning toward a PR stunt-I was wrong. Related: Apple WWDC underwhelms fans in a crucial upgrade What is amazing about that story is that roughly six months later, ChatGPT came out and put Google's AI department into panic mode. They were far behind ChatGPT, which was not even close to being sentient. Engineers from OpenAI, were the ones to start a new era, the era in which investors are presented with a statue that sort of has a human face, and has a speaker inside playing recordings of human speech, expecting that the "blind" men working on it, will soon make it become alive and beautiful. Of course, investors are also ignorant of the fact that engineers are "blind". OpenAI is now faced with many rivals, and the developing situation is starting to look like a bunch of bullies trying to out-bully each other instead of offering a superior product. Meta's recent investment of $15 billion in Scale AI seems to have hit OpenAI quite hard. OpenAI will phase out work with Scale AI, said the company spokesperson for Bloomberg on June 18th. According to the same source, Scale AI accounted for a small fraction of OpenAI's overall data needs. It looks like Meta's latest move angered OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman. In a podcast hosted by his brother, he revealed that Meta Platforms dangled $100 million signing bonuses to lure OpenAI staff, only to fail. "None of our best people have decided to take them up on that," he said, writes Moz Farooque for TheStreet. Related: Popular AI stock inks 5G network deal Unless Altman shows some evidence, this can also be a way to mislead Meta's engineers into believing they aren't compensated fairly. Not that Zuckerberg wouldn't do such a thing, but only the people involved know the truth. As if OpenAI's competition is closing in, buying partner companies and trying to poach its staff by offering ridiculous bonuses aren't enough, the company has even more problems. It is bleeding money, and has issues with a big stakeholder. More AI Stocks: Veteran fund manager raises eyebrows with latest Meta Platforms moveGoogle plans major AI shift after Meta's surprising $14 billion moveAnalysts revamp forecast for Nvidia-backed AI stock OpenAI lost about $5 billion in 2024. There are no estimates on how much the company will lose this year, but according to Bloomberg News, the company does not expect to become cash flow positive until 2029. Latest developments will likely push that date farther into the future. Microsoft has invested about $14 billion in OpenAI; however, the relationship has turned sour since then. OpenAI has considered accusing Microsoft of anticompetitive behavior in their deal, reported the Wall Street Journal on June 16th. On June 19th The Financial Times reported that Microsoft is prepared to abandon its negotiations with OpenAI if the two sides cannot agree on critical issues. Meanwhile, OpenAI has started shockingly discounting enterprise subscriptions to ChatGPT. This had angered salespeople at Microsoft, which sells competing apps at higher prices, reported The Information. Related: Amazon's latest big bet may flop "In my experience, products are only discounted when they are not selling because customers do not perceive value at the higher price. If someone loses copious amounts of money at the higher price, how will the economics work at a lower price?" wrote veteran hedge fund manager Doug Kass in his diary on TheStreet Pro." OpenAI's price cuts could kick off a price war, with a race to the bottom even as OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, and Google continue plowing tens of billions into developing it. "My suspicion, although those guys might be good (in theory) at technology, they are not good at business. I think they will find much less in the way of elasticity than they hope, because the problem is the quality of the output more than it is the price," said Kass. What will happen to OpenAI's cash flow positive plan after 2029? I doubt it is reachable with the now slashed prices. Will the company even live to see 2029? I think that is a better question. Related: Elon Musk's DOGE made huge mistakes with veterans' programs The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc.

Gizmodo

6 hours ago

• Gizmodo

The $14 Billion AI Google Killer

A new AI darling is making waves in Silicon Valley. It's called Perplexity, and according to reports, both Meta and Apple have quietly explored acquiring it. Valued at a staggering $14 billion following a May funding round, the startup is being hailed as a revolutionary threat to Google Search's search dominance. But here's the thing: it mostly just summarizes web results and sends you links. So why the frenzy? Perplexity billed itself an 'answer engine.' You ask a question, and it uses large language models to spit out a human-sounding summary, complete with footnotes. It's essentially ChatGPT with a bibliography. You might ask for the best books about the French Revolution or a breakdown of the Genius Act. In seconds, it generates a paragraph with links to Wikipedia, news outlets, or Reddit threads. Its pitch is a cleaner, ad-free, chatbot-driven search experience. No SEO junk, no scrolling. But critics say it's little more than a glorified wrapper around Google and OpenAI's APIs, with minimal proprietary tech and lots of smoke. It's fast, clean, and slick. But, they argue, at its core, it's mostly just reorganizing the internet. Big Tech's Obsession That hasn't stopped the hype. In May 2025, the San Francisco, California based company closed another $500 million funding round, pushing its valuation to $14 billion, a sharp increase from its $9 billion valuation in December 2024. Jeff Bezos, via the Jeff Bezos Family Fund, and Nvidia are among its notable backers And now, tech giants are circling. According to Bloomberg, Apple has held talks about acquiring Perplexity. Meta has also reportedly considered the move, though no formal offers have been confirmed. The logic is clear. Perplexity is fast-growing and increasingly seen as a 'Google killer,' especially among tech influencers and X power users. Traffic to its site has exploded in recent months. The company now offers a Chrome extension, mobile app, and a Pro version that gives users access to top-tier AI models like GPT-4 and Claude. Still, it's unclear what exactly makes Perplexity worth $14 billion, other than the fact that it's riding the AI wave. Why AI Skeptics Are Rolling Their Eyes For AI skeptics, Perplexity's rise is yet another example of hype outpacing substance. The site doesn't train its own models. It's not building new infrastructure. It's not revolutionizing search. It's just offering a polished interface to ask questions and get AI-generated summaries pulled from public websites. There are also growing concerns about how Perplexity sources its information. A number of news organizations, including The New York Times, Forbes, and Wired, have accused the company of plagiarizing and scraping content without permission or proper attribution. Journalists and publishers warn that this kind of AI-powered search experience threatens to cannibalize news traffic while giving little back to content creators. On June 20, the BBC became the latest outlet to threaten legal action against Perplexity AI, alleging that the company is using BBC content to train its 'default AI model,' according to the Financial Times. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas has defended the company as an 'aggregator of information.' In July 2024, the startup launched a revenue-sharing program to address the backlash. 'We have always believed that we can build a system where the whole Internet wins,' Srinivas said at the time. So Why the Gold Rush? Simple. Search is money. Google earned $50.7 billion from search ads in the first quarter, a 9.8% increase year over year. If Perplexity can convince even a small share of users to switch, and then monetize that experience, it becomes a real threat. Apple and Meta, both increasingly wary of relying on Google, see Perplexity as a fast track into the AI search race. But the stakes go even deeper. Whoever controls the next search interface controls the user. Just as Google replaced Yahoo, Perplexity could theoretically replace Google. That's why Big Tech wants in, even if it's not entirely clear what they're buying.