AI companies 🤝 defense contractors

This week: more advancements and funding for robotics.

The AI world's biggest open-source experiment just took an unexpected turn.

In a significant policy pivot, Meta will allow its open-source Llama AI models to be used by U.S. government agencies and defense contractors—including heavyweights like Lockheed Martin and Palantir. This shift signals how AI is becoming integral to defense, but it also raises serious questions.

Historically, Meta’s acceptable use policy blocked its AI models from military applications. But recently, with reports surfaced of Chinese researchers adapting Llama for military use, Meta's decision feels less like an option and more like a response to the reality that open-source AI is nearly impossible to contain.

The real question isn’t if these models will impact defense, but how we ensure responsible deployment.

This trend isn’t isolated—Anthropic recently announced similar defense collaborations. The line between Silicon Valley and national security is blurring fast. In an age where AI innovation is colliding with national interests, how should we balance progress with ethical oversight?

What do you think—is this convergence inevitable? And if so, where should the guardrails be?

It’s been quite the week. Image from the infamous reddit thread.

The Latest This Week

1. Nvidia advances robot learning and humanoid development with AI and simulation tools: Nvidia revealed new AI and simulation tools that will advance robot learning and humanoid development. The world’s biggest tech company by valuation (worth $3.432 trillion) said that the tools will enable robotics developers to greatly accelerate their work on AI-enabled robots. 

2. OpenAI pays $15M for the domain Chat.com: OpenAI bought Chat.com for a whopping $15M. Chat.com now redirects to OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, ChatGPT. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the acquisition via email. Chat.com is one of the older domains on the web, having been registered in September 1996.

3. Physical Physical Intelligence, a Robot A.I. Specialist, Raises Millions From Bezos: Physical Intelligence, an AI start-up seeking to create brains for a wide variety of robots, announced it had raised $400 million in financing from major investors. The round was led by Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s executive chairman, and the venture capital firms Thrive Capital and Lux Capital. Other investors include OpenAI, Redpoint Ventures and Bond. The fund-raising valued the company at about $2 billion, not including the new investments.The company wants to make foundational software that would work for any robot, instead of the traditional approach of creating software for specific machines and specific tasks.

4. Tencent releases Hunyuan-Large (Hunyuan-MoE-A52B) Model: A new open-source transformer-based MoE model with a total of 389 billion parameters and 52 billion active parameters. The model features an unprecedented combination of cutting-edge techniques to tackle NLP and general AI tasks, rivaling and, in some cases, outperforming other leading models such as LLama3.1-70B and LLama3.1-405B.