The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis - Meta's National Security Play and ChatGPT's 8-Figure Domain Acquisition

Episode Date: November 9, 2024

Meta's latest move positions its Llama AI models for national security applications, lifting restrictions to allow U.S. defense agencies and Five Eyes allies access to their capabilities. With rising concerns over AI’s role in military intelligence, this decision aligns with recent White House guidance on AI for national security. Brought to you by: Vanta - Simplify compliance - ⁠⁠⁠vanta.com/nlw⁠⁠⁠The AI Daily Brief helps you understand the most important news and discussions in AI. Subscribe to the podcast version of The AI Daily Brief wherever you listen: https://pod.link/1680633614 Subscribe to the newsletter: https://aidailybrief.beehiiv.com/ Join our Discord: https://bit.ly/aibreakdown

Today on the AI Daily Brief, OpenAI buys a very expensive domain and meta AI gets prepared for war. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. To join the conversation, follow the Discord link in our show notes. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief Headlines edition, all the daily AI news you need in around five minutes. We kick off today with OpenAI where ChatGPT has gotten a new domain name, chat.com. In general, a change of domain name wouldn't be the hugest news. However, this is one of the more storied domain names in the history of the web. The domain was first registered in September 1996, making it one of the earliest domains.

It was purchased for $15.5 million by the founder and CTO of HubSpot, Darmaz Shah, in early 2023. At the time, Shah wrote on his LinkedIn page, The reason I bought chat.com is simple. I think chat-based U.S. is the next big thing in software, communicating with computers and software through a natural language interface is much more intuitive. This is made possible by generative AI. Shah never did anything substantial with the domain and announced that it had been sold to a mystery buyer back in March.

Yesterday he posted on X, Secret Acquirer of $15-plus million domain name chat.com revealed, and it's exactly who you'd think. Addressing the burning question of the sale price, Shaw presented a cryptic chat GPT prompt. The substance was basically that he never sells domain names at a loss, and he always wanted to own some open AI shares. Next up today, we turn to the Middle East where Saudi Arabia is planning a $100 billion AI hub to rival neighboring projects in the UAE. Citing people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reports the project will include data

centers, startups, and other infrastructure to develop artificial intelligence. Called Project Transcendence, the initiative is aiming on recruiting new talent to the kingdom and developing the local tech ecosystem. The Kingdom's public investment fund will provide the $100 billion investment required. Earlier in the week, Google announced they're taking part in the initiative, which would include research on Arabic LLMs and quote Saudi-specific AI applications. Google wasn't clear on what the term meant, but many presume it refers to models to assist with resource extraction.

State-owned oil giant, Saudi Aramco, is already using AI across their operations and are seeing 15% production boosts at some oil sites. Google and Saudi Arabia are reportedly spending between $5 and $10 billion on the joint project. Project Transcendence intends to partner with additional large tech for firms by providing assistance with infrastructure and capital. The ambition seems large, with sources stating the goal is to bridge the gap between the Kingdom's gap with China and the U.S. on AI expertise. They said that the kingdom views this entity becoming as large as the Abu Dhabi G-42 AI conglomerate. As Ben Palladian put it, data is the new oil, and Saudi Arabia is

setting its sights on AI dominance and the Middle East and North Africa. With a $100 billion investment, the kingdom aims to fuel a digital transformation, shaping industries from health to energy. As AI reshapes the future, Saudi Arabia is ready to lead the charge. Here's one that is surprisingly controversial and maybe shows a little bit of AI fatigue setting in. Microsoft is upgrading some of their oldest tools with new AI features. Notepad, their stripped-down text editor first released back in 1983, now has an AI writing assistant. According to the Windows Insider blog, users can tap AI to rephrase sentences, adjust tone, and modify the length of your content. The feature can be activated by simply

right-clicking a highlighted passage of text. Users can then select from three suggestions in a dialog box. Paint will also have new AI image editing tools. Users can access generative fill and generative erase, and all of these features are being previewed by Windows insiders currently and will be rolled out in Windows 11 over the coming months. LLM Sherpa writes, why? I do almost everything in Notepad because it's simple and I'm too burnt for better. I write my prompts and jail breaks, edit code, take quick notes. Notepad is great because it's lightweight and minimal AF. Why are you like this, Microsoft? Still, obviously, one of the big trends we're watching right now is whether AI integrated into

very core basic experiences like this or like what we're seeing with Apple Intelligence is going to be a better path in for some new folks to join the AI party. Lastly, today, a follow-up from our story on Perplexity's election strategy, and frankly, the company did really well. The startup launched their election hub days before the vote, serving information about candidates and polling locations. On election night, they served real-time election insights and vote count maps as the results came in. All reports suggest it was extremely accurate and user-friendly going off without a hitch. Notably, most of the other AI labs decided to sit this one out, with OpenAI's chat GPT and Google's Gemini flat out refusing to answer questions

about the election. XAIs GROC was happy to discuss the election, but the results weren't very impressive. writes TechCrunch, the answers we received weren't consistent. In one case, Grock said that Trump hadn't in fact won Ohio or North Carolina because voting was ongoing. The way in which the question was worded made a difference. Adding presidential before election in the query, who won the 2024 election in Ohio, was less likely to yield a Trump one answer. While some painted this as misinformation, Grock did provide prominent links to vote.gov for more accurate information, and links to the ex post it was using as sources. In contrast, TechCrunch writes, perplexity took a risky bet, and it paid off. It's understandable why most AI labs sat this

election out, they wrote. It was the safe and responsible choice for many of them, as they've been plagued by embarrassing hallucinations at some point or another in the last year. year. The perplexity team were clearly putting all their effort towards making sure their bet paid off. CEO, Aravan Trinibas, spent the night monitoring X for bug reports and swiftly resolving them. Most impressively, their model was able to respond to questions about specific states with carefully hedged yet informative answers. TechCrunch commented, Perplexity only showed a few small hallucinations and largely produced relevant facts in a timely manner. Simming it up was Naval who wrote, Polymarket for predictions, perplexity for results.

That, however, is going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief Headlines edition. Next up, the main episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Plum. Want to use AI to automate your work but don't know where to start? Plum lets you create AI workflows by simply describing what you want. No coding or API keys required. Imagine typing out, AI, analyze my Zoom meetings and send me your insights in Notion and watching it come to life before your eyes.

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its implications for not just technology and not just business, but for national security, for geopolitics. We talked about this a lot yesterday in the context of the elections and how Trump's policy vis-a-vis China. might impact his administration's approach to, for example, open source AI. Even before the elections, we also recently got the White House memo around AI and national security that made it very clear that American leadership in AI is a national security imperative. Basically, you have both the Democrats and the Republicans saying the same thing,

which is that AI is integral to the future of American leadership in the world, and all of that kind of sets a scene for today's story, which is about meta and how they are now ready for war. So what happened is that META has granted approval for their Lama models to be used by U.S. government agencies and defense contractors. While the models are open source until now they have had an acceptable use policy that bars them from being used in projects related to, quote, military warfare, nuclear industries and espionage. However, the company has now granted an exception for U.S. defense agencies as well as close allies within the Five Eyes Intelligence Network, including Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand. Other close allies such as Israel and Japan are notably not on this list. In a blog post, Meda's president of Global Affairs, Nick Clegg wrote,

As an American company and one that owes its success in no small part to the entrepreneurial spirit and democratic values the United States upholds, Mehta wants to play its part to support the safety, security, and economic prosperity of America and of its closest allies too. Clegg suggested that Lama could be useful for tasks like data analysis and synthesis of documents, as well as to, quote, track terrorist financing or straggs. our cyber defenses. In a follow-up email, a spokesperson was vague on how defense agencies would actually use Lama, but said, it is the responsibility of countries leveraging AI for national security to deploy AI ethically, responsibly, and in accordance with relevant international law.

The announcement highlights how important the recent White House National Security Memorandum on AI was in allowing adoption for national security purposes. Among many other provisions, the memo provided the basic safeguards on how AI would be used. It specifically mentioned that AI would not be used to track American citizen's speech or given control of nuclear launch codes. More generally, the White House said AI must now be used in ways that, quote, do not align with democratic values. The memo also contained a lengthy classified section that presumably made more specific representations of how AI would and would not be used. For AI companies, the memo seemed to have calmed ethical and PR concerns about the use of AI in the military and intelligence services.

OpenAI responded to the memo with a blog post which stated that the framework in that memo opens up the potential to support more national security work in the U.S. and allied countries in a way that stays true to our mission. Of course, the worst nightmare for all of these AI labs is a headline that their technology was used to commit war crimes or accidentally launch a nuclear missile. And it seems like increasingly at the moment the White House has done enough to put those fears, if not to rest, then certainly on the back burner. The other looming issue is AI adoption among America's adversaries. In his blog post, Clegg explicitly referred to this issue writing, we believe it is in both America and the wider democratic world's interest for American

open-source models to excel and succeed over models from China and elsewhere. Earlier this week, meanwhile, it was revealed that the People's Liberation Army and China are already making use of Lama. A June paper reviewed by Reuters explained how Chinese researchers had built a military intelligence chatbot called Chatbit using Meta's previous generation Lama 213B model. The paper said that Chatbit was optimized for dialogue and question-answering tasks in the military field. It added, in the future, through technological refinement, chatbit will not only be applied to intelligence analysis, but also strategic planning, simulation training, and command decision-making

will be explored. The paper said the chatbot was 90% as capable as much larger models. Meta downplayed the news, however, commenting, in the global competition on AI, the alleged role of a single and outdated version of an American open source model is irrelevant when we know China is already investing more than a trillion dollars to surpass the U.S. on AI. VP of AI research, Joel Pinot, added. that's a drop in the ocean compared to most of these models that are trained with trillions of tokens. So it really makes me question what do they actually achieve here in terms of different capabilities.

Still, the news was enough to cause alarm among analysts. Sonny Chung, a Chinese tech expert at the Jamestown Foundation, said, it's the first time there has been substantial evidence that PLA military experts in China have been systematically researching and trying to leverage the power of open source LLMs, especially those of meta for military purposes. William Hannis, the lead analyst at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology said, can you keep China out of the cookie jar? No, I don't see how you can. There's too much collaboration going on between China's best scientists and the U.S. best AI scientists for them to be excluded from developments. So to put it differently, with the Chinese military clearly willing to violate the acceptable use policy, one way to read meta's actions is that they felt it was time to make an exception for U.S. armed forces as well. Anyways, I would expect there to be a lot more around AI and national security strategy in the months to come.

For now that that is going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief. Appreciate you listening or watching. as always, and until next time, peace.