In this industry, a contract with MS is as close to directly having a DOD contract as you can get.
Remember when MS bought Skype, turned off end to end encryption and got rid of the P2P mechanisms, to eventually appear in the leaks about PRISM?
Likely Bing integration of ChatGPT is the more innocuous use of the technology. Once they have gotten input from the AI experts at OpenAI on how to use their generative text model inside search engines, they can also use it for building search masks for analysts to sift through the massive amounts of data they have on individuals, to name one of the many potential uses in the intelligence community.
On the bright side, at least OpenAI publishes some high level info on what they did. It's published research, not hidden in secrecy, like say how to build planes invisible under radar. I'm just a bit sad about the employees who likely had better paying alternative offers but were joining, what they thought, the mission oriented job at OpenAI.
Yep. While also partnering with the ultimate villain in the open software fight. Funded by taxpayer money yet closed... that's actually a lot of things.
In a bit of historical irony, the mathematics underpinning the development of early stealth aircraft was based on published research by a Soviet scientist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyotr_Ufimtsev