Mark Zuckerberg and Meta would like you to know that they love America. Meta announced today that it would make its Llama models available to U.S. government agencies and contractors working on issues of national security.
“We are pleased to confirm that we are also making Llama available to U.S. government agencies, including those that are working on defense and national security applications, and private sector partners supporting their work,” Nick Clegg, Meta’s President of Global Affairs said in a blog post.
Meta’s Llama models are open source, meaning that anyone who gets hold of them can essentially do whatever they want. But the announcement today marks a shift away from Meta’s own acceptable use policy for the models which had a provision against “military, warfare, nuclear industries or applications, espionage.”
According to the blog post, Meta is patterning with companies that include “Accenture Federal Services, Amazon Web Services, Anduril, Booz Allen, Databricks, Deloitte, IBM, Leidos, Lockheed Martin, Microsoft, Oracle, Palantir, Scale AI and Snowflake to bring Llama to government agencies.”
Meta said that Oracle was using Llama to synthesize aircraft maintenance documents to aid in maintenance. It also said weapons manufacturers would use Llama for a bunch of different things, including “code generation, data analysis, and enhancing business processes.”
Why this sudden pivot to American defense contractors? It might have something to do with a Reuters report from last week that discovered various researchers connected to the Chinese military had availed themselves of Meta’s Llama 2 AI model.
There’s absolutely no evidence or even any indication that Meta had any direct hand in the People’s Liberation Army’s use of Llama 2. But critics have pointed out that Zuckerberg is weirdly close to China. The Meta CEO met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2017. Three years before that, he told a Chinese newspaper that he’d bought copies of Xi’s book, The Governance of China, for his employees. Why? “I want them to understand socialism with Chinese characteristics,” he said at the time.
But Zuckerberg is going through a rebrand that’s all-in on Americana. He’s grown his hair out, dresses like a normal human being, and talks about the U.S. every time he gets the chance. On July 4 of this year, he posted a video of himself on a boogie board in a Tuxedo waving an American flag and drinking a Twisted Tea.
Clegg’s announcement is full of treacly invocations of the American spirit. “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, Meta wants to play its part to support the safety, security and economic prosperity of America—and of its closest allies too,” the post said.
“For decades, 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, develop global standards for new technology,” it went on. “Open source systems have helped to accelerate defense research and high-end computing, identify security vulnerabilities and improve communication between disparate systems.”
In the end, it did, of course, mention the competition. “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,” it said.
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