“OpenAI builds artificial intelligence to benefit as many people as possible and supports U.S. efforts to ensure the technology upholds democratic values,” Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, said in a statement Wednesday.
OpenAI’s artificial intelligence models will be used to improve systems used in air defense, Brian Schimpf, co-founder and CEO of Anduril, said in a statement. “Together, we are committed to developing responsible solutions that will enable military and intelligence operators to make faster and better decisions in high-pressure situations,” he said.
OpenAI’s technology will be used to “assess drone threats more quickly and accurately, giving operators the information they need to make better decisions while avoiding threats,” says a former OpenAI employee who left the company earlier this year and spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to protecting your professional relationships.
Earlier this year, OpenAI changed its policy regarding the employ of artificial intelligence for military applications. A source who worked at the company at the time said some employees were unhappy with the change, but there were no open protests. US military already uses according to reports by The Intercept, some OpenAI technology.
Anduril is developing an advanced air defense system consisting of a swarm of miniature, autonomous aircraft that cooperate during missions. These aircraft are controlled through an interface based on a vast language model that interprets natural language commands and translates them into instructions that both pilots and drones can understand and execute. So far, Anduril has been using open source language models for testing purposes.
It is currently unknown whether Anduril uses advanced artificial intelligence to control its autonomous systems or enable them to make their own decisions. Such a move would be riskier, especially given the unpredictability of contemporary models.
A few years ago, many artificial intelligence researchers in Silicon Valley were vehemently opposed to working with the military. In 2018, thousands of Google employees organized protests against the company providing artificial intelligence to the US Department of Defense as part of a project then known in the Pentagon as Project Maven. Google later withdrew from the project.