Meta is opening up its Llama AI models to government agencies and contractors working on national security, the company said in an update. The group includes more than a dozen private sector companies that partner with the U.S. government, including Amazon Web Services, Oracle and Microsoft, as well as defense contractors like Palantir and Lockheed Martin.
Mark Zuckerberg hinted at the move during Meta’s earnings call last week, when he said the company was “working with the public sector to drive Llama adoption across the entire U.S. government.” Now, Meta is giving more details about the extent of that work.
For example, Oracle is “working on Llama to synthesize aircraft maintenance documents so technicians can more quickly and accurately diagnose problems, reducing repair times and getting critical aircraft back into service.” According to Meta, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft are “using Llama to support governments by hosting our models on their secure cloud solutions for sensitive data.”
Meta is also offering similar access to Llama to governments and contractors in the U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Bloomberg reports. Meta’s president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, suggested in a blog post that these partnerships will help the U.S. compete with China in the global arms race over artificial intelligence.
“We believe it is in the interest of both the United States and the broader democratic world that the American open source model outperforms and succeeds in comparison to models in China and elsewhere,” he wrote.
“As an American company, and one whose success is largely attributable to the entrepreneurial spirit and democratic values embraced by the United States, Meta wants to play its part in supporting the safety, security and economic prosperity of America – and its closest allies.”
Meta is preparing for even more layoffs, Bloomberg reports. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a company memo that he plans to cut about five percent of his “low-performing” staff.
“I’ve decided to raise the bar on performance management and weed out low performers faster,” Zuckerberg said in the memo. “We typically weed out people who don’t meet expectations over the course of a year, but now we’re going to make performance-based cuts throughout this cycle.” Overall, once layoffs are taken into account, Meta could have 10 percent fewer employees. Bloomberg suggested that the upcoming pink slips will focus on people “who have been with the company long enough to receive a performance rating.”