Meta and Anduril join forces on battlefield tech
Meta and defence tech startup Anduril Industries on Thursday announced a partnership to build mixed reality gear for "warfighters" (soldiers) to control autonomous systems on battlefields.
Meta will incorporate augmented reality and artificial intelligence (AI), presumably in the likes of glasses, goggles, or visors, with an Anduril data analytics platform called Lattice, the companies said in a joint release.
"Meta has spent the last decade building AI and AR to enable the computing platform of the future," Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said in the release. "We're proud to partner with Anduril to help bring these technologies to the American servicemembers that protect our interests at home and abroad."
Since Trump took back the White House, Zuckerberg has courted the president with frequent visits and notable changes to corporate policies on matters like content moderation, aligning himself politically with the Republican administration.
Zuckerberg also bought a $23 million residence in the U.S. capital.
The Anduril alliance will have Meta taking part in courting the U.S. military.
"I am glad to be working with Meta once again," said Anduril founder Palmer Luckey, who also co-founded virtual reality startup Oculus, bought in 2014 by what was then Facebook.
"My mission has long been to turn warfighters into technomancers, and the products we are building with Meta do just that," he said, referring to the idea of magicians who combine magic and technology.
Luckey left Facebook in 2017, his departure coming after the social networking giant was hit with a big tab in a lawsuit over Oculus Rift virtual reality technology, and after he was criticized for covertly helping an online "troll" group that promoted memes in favor of Trump during the U.S. election a year earlier.
Open support for Trump in Silicon Valley was scarce during that election, and some developers vowed not to create software for Rift virtual reality gear because of Luckey's pro-Trump efforts.
Luckey went on to co-found California-based Anduril.
Anduril describes its Lattice platform as an AI-powered command and control system that integrates data from thousands of sources to provide real-time battlefield intelligence for decision making.
Big tech companies are increasingly waving the U.S. flag in Washington with Trump pushing his America First agenda.
Leading this performance of nationalism are Meta, OpenAI and, more predictably, Palantir, the AI defence company founded by Peter Thiel, the conservative tech billionaire who has played a major role in Silicon Valley's rightward shift.
Meta has touted AI models like its own as "essential for the US to win the AI race against China and ensure American AI dominance."
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