Latest news with #DefenceIndustrialBase
Euronews
3 days ago
- Business
- Euronews
Who are the four tech executives joining the US Army?
The US military created a new army reserve body earlier this month that included four players from the biggest tech companies in the world. The Army's new initiative – Detachment 201, called the Executive Innovation Corps to Drive Tech Transformation, will see senior tech executives serve as advisors to the military to 'help guide rapid and scalable tech solutions to complex problems,' the army's website reads. 'By bringing private sector know-how into uniform, Det. 201 is supercharging efforts … to make the force leaner, smarter and more lethal'. (The US Army has issued an interest form since the four tech executives joined in the hopes of recruiting more tech executives to the detachment.) The first four reserve members are Shyam Sankar, Palantir's chief technology officer, Andrew Bosworth, Meta's chief technology officer, Kevin Weil, OpenAI's chief product officer, and Bob McGrew, advisor at Thinking Machines Lab and former chief research officer at OpenAI. All four have been given the title of Lieutenant Colonel, a senior officer rank that often oversees battalions of between 300 to 1,000 people. Shyam Sankar Shyam Sankar claims he joined Palantir Technologies, an American company that trades in software platforms for big data analytics as 'employee #13'. He said he brought the forward deployed engineer role to the company, a software engineer who works directly with clients to embed Palantir's technology into its weapons. Sankar holds a bachelor's in electrical and computer engineering from Cornell University and a master's degree in management science and engineering from Stanford University. In 2024, Sankar wrote the 'Defence Reformation,' a 4000-word 'treatise' that lays out how he believes the US should reform its military, including ways to introduce more competition into a defence tech industry that he believes has been consolidated. 'We are in [a] state of undeclared emergency,' he wrote. 'For more than three decades, we've accepted a stagnant Defence Industrial Base … with no great power competition. 'Change is now possible because we all realise there is something worse than change: irrelevance,' he said. Sankar's swearing in to the military comes a few weeks after Palantir won a $795 million (€678.5 million) contract for its Maven Smart System software licenses. Earlier this year, the company also provided the US military with its first Tactical Intelligence Targeting Access Node (TITAN) systems, the first AI-powered mobile ground station to help soldiers with warfare strategy. Andrew Bosworth Bosworth, known in the tech community as 'Boz,' joined Meta in 2006 when Mark Zuckerberg was ramping up the social media platform Facebook. Initially, Bosworth was Zuckerberg's teaching assistant in an artificial intelligence (AI) class at Harvard in 2004. Despite rarely coming to his class, Facebook recruiters called Bosworth while he was working at Microsoft in Seattle, and the rest is history. The company credits Bosworth with creating the News Feed, where users often see recent posts from their friends and family, along with early 'anti-abuse systems' that are still in place on the network. In 2017, Bosworth created the company's first virtual reality (VR) division called Reality Labs, which he still leads. He also leads the company's artificial intelligence (AI) efforts, called Meta AI, and Meta's smart glasses technology. He said on X that he was 'honoured' to join the US military because he is 'deeply invested in helping advance American technological innovation'. Bosworth's swearing in comes less than a month after Meta and US-based defence tech company Anduril announced a partnership to integrate extended reality (XR) products into American warfighters, giving them 'enhanced perception … and intuitive control of autonomous platforms on the battlefield'. In an interview with CNBC, Bosworth said his decision to serve is separate from defence deals that Meta has made. Kevin Weil and Bob McGrew McGrew, OpenAI's former chief researcher, is now an advisor to Thinking Labs. The new AI start-up, founded by ex-OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati, is now worth an estimated $10 billion (€8.53 billion), six months after launch. McGrew shared on X that he left OpenAI last September, describing his eight years at the company as a 'humbling and awe-inspiring journey'. In the message, he shares that he was a part of pioneering large language models (LLMs) at the company as well as building some of the first multimodal models of the popular AI chatbot, ChatGPT. He also launched ChatGPT's o1 series that reasons through complex tasks such as science, coding and math. Weil is a recent recruit to OpenAI, having joined the company in 2024 as chief product officer. He's leading a team 'focused on applying our research to products and services that benefit consumers, developers and businesses,' according to the company. Before joining OpenAI, Weil has had stints at many of the dominant social media companies, starting at Twitter, now known as X. As the social network's head of product, he claims he scaled the company from 40 to 4,000 employees and from $0 to $2 billion (€1.7 billion) in annual revenue. Weil also worked as vice-president of product at Instagram and kept that same job after Meta's acquisition of the social media site until 2021. At Instagram, he's credited with launching 'Instagram Stories,' a part of the app where users share up-to-date images or videos of what they are up to. Weil also serves on a variety of boards, like Cisco, the US Nature Conservancy and is listed as 'Operator in Residence' at his wife Elizabeth Weil's venture capital firm, Scribble Ventures. His LinkedIn profile says he graduated from Harvard University in 2005 with a bachelor's in physics and mathematics and a master's degree from Stanford University in physics. OpenAI was awarded a $200 million (€170.7 million) US defence contract to 'develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains,' three days after Weil was named to the US Army.
Techday NZ
19-06-2025
- Business
- Techday NZ
Oracle launches defence ecosystem to boost security tech ties
Oracle has announced the Oracle Defense Ecosystem, a global initiative intended to transform the way that defence and government technology is delivered. The Oracle Defense Ecosystem is aimed at strengthening the national security infrastructure for the United States and its allies by enabling more efficient collaboration between technology innovators and government and defence organisations. The initiative seeks to remove longstanding barriers that have limited access to the latest cloud and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies within national security sectors. Access to technology National security organisations have often struggled to incorporate emerging technology due to complex procurement procedures, stringent qualification criteria, and the necessity for established networks within the Defence Industrial Base. Oracle's ecosystem is designed to address these issues by offering direct support and resources for defence tech providers. According to Oracle, its cloud infrastructure—Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI)—forms the backbone of these efforts and is already recognised for meeting strict compliance requirements demanded by the defence and government sector. The initial set of organisations participating in the ecosystem includes Arqit, Entanglement, Fenix Group (now part of Nokia Federal Solutions), Koniku, Kraken, Mattermost, Metron, SensusQ, and Whitespace. "Nothing is more important than the national security of the U.S. and its allies, and Oracle has been a cornerstone of this mission for nearly 50 years," said Rand Waldron, Vice President, Oracle. "Oracle and our defense ecosystem plans to innovate and scale to help the U.S. and its allies deter conflicts and win on physical and digital battlefields." Membership benefits The Oracle Defense Ecosystem is designed to offer accelerated growth opportunities for organisations working within the defence and government technology sectors. Participating members are able to access a number of Oracle-facilitated resources and support services, across a wide spectrum of business and technical areas. Through Oracle Sales Support, member organisations can utilise the expertise of Oracle's sales team. This is intended to aid in crafting industry-specific messaging and tailored solutions that match the varied needs of global defence customers. Members are also encouraged to leverage technology and solutions developed within the ecosystem, offering them an expanded portfolio to address unique challenges. One of the cornerstone partnerships highlighted is with Palantir, offering access to Palantir Foundry and Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. This integration allows early-stage defence technology firms to deploy enterprise-grade software for operations, product development, natural language model integration, as well as security and governance requirements. Through direct listing on the Oracle Cloud Marketplace, members are able to make their solutions accessible to customers in all OCI regions, supported by a continuous integration and continuous deployment pipeline for delivering feature enhancements consistently across the globe. Streamlining compliance Defence and government organisations operate with rigorous security standards, and Oracle says the ecosystem is structured to help companies meet these swiftly. Through guidance from Oracle's executive advisors and specific solutions such as the OCI Core Landing Zone, members may accelerate their path to Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) compliance, saving significant time on manual processes and cloud architecture setup. In addition, Oracle provides frameworks such as the Cloud Native Secure Cloud Computing Architecture (SCCA) Landing Zone, aimed at reducing time and costs associated with SCCA-compliant deployments and standardising security across systems portfolios. Members also have access to documentation and Oracle's expert guidance in these specialised areas. Business operations and support Participants in the Oracle Defense Ecosystem will receive access to business management tools with preferred pricing for Oracle NetSuite, its AI-based management suite, which is utilised by more than 42,000 organisations globally. This solution facilitates streamlined business operations and provides a scalable platform for future growth. Additionally, organisations within the initiative can benefit from access to secure office facilities used to support defence customers, as well as training and certification credits available via Oracle University for cloud infrastructure, applications, and databases. The introduction of the Oracle Defense Ecosystem marks an effort to lower technological and procedural barriers for defence and government tech innovators, while aligning them with cloud and AI tools and resources required to serve complex national security requirements.
