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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.
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