Meta's National Security Play and ChatGPT's 8-Figure Domain Acquisition

Today on the AI Daily Brief OpenAI buys a very expensive domain and Meta AI gets prepared for war. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. To join the conversation, follow the Discord link in our show. Notes. Welcome Back to the AI Daily Brief Headlines Edition. All the daily AI news you need in around five minutes. We kick off today with OpenAI where ChatGPT has gotten a new domain name chat.com in general, a change of domain name wouldn't be the hugest news. However, this is one of the more storied domain names in the history of the web. The domain was first registered in September 1996, making it one of the earliest domains. It was purchased for 15.5 million by the founder and CTO of HubSpot, Dharmesh Shah in early 2023. At the time, Shah wrote on his LinkedIn page, The reason I bought chat.com is simple. I think chat based UX is the next big thing in software. Communicating with computers and software through a natural language interface is much more intuitive. This is made possible by generative AI. Shaw never did anything substantial with the domain and announced that it had been sold to a mystery buyer back in March. Yesterday he posted on X secret acquirer of $15 million domain name chat.com revealed and it's exactly who you'd think. Addressing the burning question of the sale price, Shah presented a cryptic chatgpt prompt. The substance was basically that he never sells domain names at a loss and he always wanted to own some OpenAI shares. Next up Today we turn to the Middle east, where Saudi Arabia is planning a $100 billion AI hub to rival neighboring projects in the UAE. Citing people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg reports the project will include data centers, startups and other infrastructure to develop artificial intelligence. Called Project Transcendence, the initiative is aiming on recruiting new talent to the kingdom and developing the local tech ecosystem. The kingdom's public investment fund will provide the $100 billion investment required. Earlier in the week, Google announced they're taking part in the initiative, which would include research on Arabic LLMs and quote, Saudi specific AI applications. Google wasn't clear on what the term meant, but many presume it refers to models to assist with resource extraction. State owned oil giant Saudi Aramco Is already using AI across their operations are seeing 15% production boosts at some oil sites. Google and Saudi Arabia are reportedly spending between 5 and $10 billion on the joint project. Project Transcendence intends to partner with additional large tech firms by providing assistance with infrastructure and capital. The ambition seems large, with sources stating the goal is to bridge the gap between the kingdom's gap with China and the US on AI expertise. They said that the kingdom views this entity becoming as large as the Abu Dhabi G42AI conglomerate. As Ben Palladian put it, data is the new oil and Saudi Arabia is setting its sights on AI dominance and the Middle east and North Africa. With a $100 billion investment, the Kingdom aims to fuel a digital transformation, shaping industries from health to energy. As AI reshapes the future, Saudi Arabia is ready to lead the charge. Here's one that is surprisingly controversial and maybe shows a little bit of AI fatigue setting in. Microsoft is upgrading some of their oldest tools with new AI features. Notepad, their stripped down text editor, first released back in 1983, now has an AI writing assistant. According to the Windows Insider blog, users can tap AI to rephrase sentences, adjust tone and modify the length of your content. The feature can be activated by simply right clicking a highlighted passage of text. Users can then select from three suggestions in a dialog box. Paint will also have new AI image editing tools. Users can access Generative Fill and Generative Eraser, and all of these features are being previewed by Windows Insiders currently and will be rolled out in Windows 11 over the coming months. LLM Sherpa writes why I do almost everything in Notepad because it's simple and I'm too burnt for better. I write my prompts and jailbreaks, edit code, take quick notes. Notepad is great because it's lightweight and minimal AF why are you like this Microsoft? Still Obviously one of the big trends we're watching right now is whether AI integrated into very core basic experiences like this or like what we're seeing with Apple. Intelligence is is going to be a better path in for some new folks to join the AI party. Lastly today, a follow up from our story on Perplexity's election strategy and frankly, the company did really well. The startup launched their election hub days before the vote, serving information about candidates and polling locations on election night. They served real time election insights and vote count maps as the results came in. All reports suggest it was extremely accurate and user friendly, going off without a hitch. Notably, most of the other AI labs decided to sit this one out with OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini flat out refusing to answer questions about the election. Xai's Grok was happy to discuss the election, but the results weren't very impressive, writes TechCrunch. The answers we received weren't consistent. In one case, Grok said that Trump hadn't in fact won Ohio or North Carolina because voting was ongoing. The way in which the question was worded made a difference, adding presidential before election in the query who won the 2024 election in Ohio was less likely to yield a Trump one answer. While some painted this as misinformation, Grok did provide prominent links to Vote.gov for more accurate information and links to the X posts it was using as sources. In contrast, TechCrunch writes, Perplexity took a risky bet and it paid off. It's understandable why most AI labs sat this election out. They wrote it was the safe and responsible choice for many of them, as they've been plagued by embarrassing hallucinations at some point or another in the last year. The Perplexity team were clearly putting all their effort towards making sure their bet paid off. CEO Aravan Srinivas spent the night monitoring X for bug reports and swiftly resolving them. Most impressively, their model was able to respond to questions about specific states with carefully hedged yet informative answers. TechCrunch commented perplexity only showed a few small hallucinations and largely produced relevant facts in a timely manner. Summing it up was Naval, who wrote Poly Market for predictions, Perplexity for results. That, however, is going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief Headlines edition. Next up, the main episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Plum. Wanna use AI to automate your work but don't know where to start? Plum lets you create AI workflows by simply describing what you want. No coding or API keys required. Imagine typing out AI, analyze my Zoom meetings and send me your insights in notion and watching it come to life before your eyes. Whether you're an operations leader, marketer, or even a non technical founder, Plum gives you the power of AI without the technical hassle. Get instant access to top models like GPT4O, Cloudsonnet, 3.5, Assembly AI and many more. Don't let technology hold you back. Check out Useplum. That's Plum with a B for early access to the future of workflow automation. Today's episode is brought to you by Vanta. Whether you're starting or scaling your company's security program, demonstrating top notch security practices and establishing trust is more important than ever. Vanta automates compliance for ISO 27001, SoC2GDPR and leading AI frameworks like ISO 42001 and NIST AI Risk Management Framework, saving you time and money while helping you build customer trust. Plus, you can streamline security reviews by automating questionnaires and demonstrating your security posture with a customer facing trust center. All powered by Vanta AI. Over 8,000 global companies like LangChain, Leela AI and Factory AI use Vanta to demonstrate AI trust improved security in real time. Learn more at vanta.comnlw that's vanta.comnlw Today's episode is brought to you by Superintelligent. Every single business workflow and function is being remade and reimagined with artificial intelligence. There is a huge challenge, however, of going from the potential of AI to actually capturing that value, and that gap is what superintelligent is dedicated to filling. Superintelligent accelerates AI adoption and engagement to help teams actually use AI to increase productivity and drive business value. An interactive AI use case registry gives your company full visibility into how people are using artificial intelligence right now. Pair that with capabilities building content in the form of tutorials, learning paths and a use case library and superintelligent helps people inside your company show how they're getting value out of AI while providing resources for people to put that inspiration into action. The next three teams that sign up with 100 or more seats are going to get free embedded consulting. That's a process by which our super intelligent team sits with your organization, figures out the specific use cases that matter most to you, and helps actually ensure support for adoption of those use cases to drive real value. Go to BeSuper AI to learn more about this AI enablement network. And now back to the show. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. One of the big themes recently around artificial intelligence has been, of course, its implications for not just technology and not just business, but for national security. For geopolitics. We talked about this a lot yesterday in the context of the elections and how Trump's policy vis a vis China movement might impact his administration's approach to, for example, open source AI even before the elections. We also recently got the White House memo around AI and national security that made it very clear that American leadership in AI is a national security imperative. Basically, you have both the Democrats and the Republicans saying the same thing, which is that AI is integral to the future of American leadership in the world. And all of that kind of sets the scene for today's story, which is about Meta and how they are now ready for war. So what happened is that Meta has granted approval for their Llama models to be used by US Government agencies and defense contractors. While the models are open source. Until now, they have had an acceptable use policy that bars them from being used on projects related to military warfare, nuclear industries and espionage. However, the company has now granted an exception for US Defense agencies as well as close allies within the Five Eyes Intelligence network, including Canada, the uk, Australia and New Zealand. Other close allies such as Israel and Japan are notably not on this list. In a blog post, Meta's President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg wrote, 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. Clegg suggested that LLAMA could be useful for tasks like data analysis and synthesis of documents, as well as to, quote, track terrorist financing or strengthen our cyber defenses. In a follow up email, a spokesperson was vague on how defense agencies would actually use lama, but said it is the responsibility of countries leveraging AI for national security to deploy AI ethically, responsibly and in accordance with relevant international law. The announcement highlights how important the recent White House National Security memorandum on AI was in allowing adoption for national security purposes. Among many other provisions, the memo provided the basic safeguards on how AI would be used. It specifically mentioned that AI would not be used to track American citizen speech or given control of nuclear launch codes. More generally, the White House said AI must now be used in ways that, quote, do not align with democratic values. The memo also contained a lengthy classified section that presumably made more specific representations of how AI would and would not be used for AI companies. The memos seem to have calmed ethical and PR concerns about the use of AI in the military and intelligence services. OpenAI responded to the memo with a blog post which stated that the framework in that memo opens up the potential to support more national security work in the US and allied countries in a way that stays true to our mission. Of course, the worst nightmare for all of these AI labs is a headline that their technology was used to commit war crimes or accidentally launch a nuclear missile. And it seems like increasingly at the moment, the White House has done enough to put those fears, if not to rest, then certainly on the back burner. The other looming issue is AI adoption among America's adversaries. In his blog post, Clegg explicitly referred to this issue, writing, 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. Earlier this week, meanwhile, it was revealed that the People's Liberation army in China are already making use of Llama. A June paper reviewed by Reuters explained how Chinese researchers had built a military intelligence chatbot called Chatbit using Meta's previous generation llama 2.13B model. The paper said that Chatbit was optimized for dialogue and question answering tasks in the military field. It added, in the future, through technological refinement, CHAT BIT will not only be applied to intelligence analysis, but also strategic planning, simulation training and command decision making will be explored. The paper said the chatbot was 90% as capable as much larger models. Meta downplayed the news, however, commenting in the global competition on AI, the alleged role of a single and outdated version of an American open source model is irrelevant when we know China is already investing more than a trillion dollars to surpass the US on AI. VP of AI Research Joel Pinault added, that's a drop in the ocean compared to most of these models that are trained with trillions of tokens. So it really makes me question what did they actually achieve here in terms of different capabilities. Still, the news was enough to cause alarm among analysts. Sunny Chung, a Chinese tech expert at the Jamestown foundation, said, it's the first time there has been substantial evidence that PLA military experts in China have been systematically researching and trying to leverage the power of open source LLMs, especially those of Meta, for military purposes. William Hannes, the lead analyst at Georgetown University center for Security and Emerging Technology, said, can you keep China out of the cookie jar? No, I don't see how you can. There's too much collaboration going on between China's best scientists and the US best AI scientists for them to be excluded from developments. So to put it differently, with the Chinese military clearly willing to violate the acceptable use policy, one way to read Meta's actions is that they felt it was time to make an exception for US Armed forces as well. Anyways, I would expect there to be a lot more around AI and national security strategy in the months to come. For now though, that is going to do it for today's AI Daily Brief. Appreciate you listening or watching as always. And until next time, peace.