Government contractor Carahsoft is OpenAI’s path to defense contracts

The Prompt is a weekly roundup of AI’s hottest startups, biggest breakthroughs and business deals. To get it in your inbox, register here.

Welcome back to The Prompt.

OpenAI is making a foray into the defense world by partnering with Carahsoft, a little-known billionaire government contractor that said it had $16 billion in revenue last year. Carahsoft is also fighting allegations of alleged price-fixing in Defense Department contracts. In addition to helping OpenAI market its technology to the US military, Carahsoft has sold hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of ChatGPT licenses to other federal agencies such as NASA, the National Gallery of Art, and the Department of Agriculture.

Smaller startups like AI voice production Resemble AI and coding automation company Codeium are also using Carahsoft as a stepping stone to the public sector.

Now let’s get into the headlines.

BIG GAMES

Creator of ChatGPT OpenAI tries to form bonds with social media creators as the AI ​​giant faces backlash from some creators for allegedly using YouTube transcripts and copyrighted material to train models. The company is currently hiring “Head of Internet Creators” to strengthen relationships with influencers, according to a new job listing. The company has also partnered with artists and creatives to provide feedback on its AI tools, such as the Sora video production model, and to create content it has co-published on its channels.

said Don Allen Stevenson Forbes that content creators like him play a vital role communicating OpenAI technology to a wider audience. The company also works with Nice Aunties, a popular Instagram account run by a Singaporean architect-designer that uses AI-powered image and video generators to create quirky depictions of women inspired by “aunt culture” in Asian communities.

ETHICS + LAW

THE National Archives plans to launch a public production AI tool called “Archie,” 404 Media was mentioned. The federal agency is also pushing its employees to use in-house software based on Google’s Gemini model. But these workers raised a number of concerns about whether the model would provide reliable information, draw from copyrighted data sources, or leak confidential files. As I mentioned last month, the Library of Congress (the world’s largest library) becomes a playground for AI companies and plans to develop AI tools for its librarians.

Elsewhere, the New York Times sent a cease and desist letter to AI search startup Perplexity, asking the company to stop accessing and using its content, the Wall Street Journal reported for the first time. CEO Aravind Srinivas responded by saying “we have no interest in competing with anyone here.” I reported with my colleague Sarah Emerson in June that the company was republishing entire sentences of news articles from several news outlets, including Forbes, through Pages features.

AI DEAL OF THE WEEK

Decagonwhich builds AI-powered software to handle customer service for companies like Eventbrite, Slack and Duolingo, announced today that raised $65 million in a round led by Bain Capital Venturesvaluing the startup at $650 million. CEO Jesse Zhang tells me that his company AI agents had to participate in what are called “bake offs” in which one software tool goes up against another to secure contracts.

Also of note: AI assessment startup Galileo has raised $45 million in funding, my colleague Richard Nieva reported.

DEEP DIVING

Musk silenced Memphis government employees

Nearly six months ago in Memphis, before residents or even city councilors knew that Elon Musk was building “the world’s largest supercomputer” in their backyard, the billionaire’s team secretly met with a number of local and national law enforcement agencies. law, including the sheriff’s office, Memphis. Police Department, US Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The secret meeting was about Musk’s growing artificial intelligence startup xAI, according to the Greater Memphis Chamber, an economic development group that has been leading the behind-closed-doors deal since March.

“I really appreciate everyone’s time and commitment to this project. We are on the cusp of an amazing moment in Memphis history,” Chamber economic development chief Gwyn Fisher wrote to the group in an email. He offered them a tour of Musk’s new facility on one condition: that they sign nondisclosure agreements with an entity called CTC Property, a mysterious shell company controlled by Musk’s fixer and personal banker, Jared Birchall.

In the bones of an empty factory along the Mississippi River, xAI’s supercomputer was put together in just four months. Nicknamed ‘Colossus’, as Forbes was revealed for the first time, the Chamber publicly announced In June, xAI would make its “new home” in Memphis, bragging about the speed with which the “multi-billion dollar” deal was closed. However, council members said it was the first they had heard of the project and asked for more time and information to understand the venture that is set to make xAI one of the biggest consumers of energy and water in the city. A month later, the data center was officially online.

Read the full story at Forbes.

AI INDEX

$700,000

That’s how much enterprise-focused AI maker Writer spent to train its latest frontier model called Palmyra X004. That’s a tiny fraction of the roughly $7 billion that OpenAI incurs to train its models, per The Information.

said CEO May Habib Forbes in an interview “we have to be more flexible and have invented a number of techniques around synthetic data and how we better structure the data that LLM processes”.

EXAMINATION

That company, which helps businesses like Toyato and Nestle develop artificial intelligence tools and has $350 million in revenue, is eyeing an IPO in 2025.

1. Brains
2. AIR
3. Data bricks
4. OpenAI

Check if you have it here.

STANDARD BEHAVIOR

Earlier this month, workout tracking app Strava launched an AI feature called Athlete Intelligence that created summaries of people’s running, swimming and cycling stats. But users are far from impressed. Some have told my colleague Cyrus Farivar that the possibility offers them soft and general talk and “Bullshit”. The feature tends to tell everyone they’re “crushing it”, whatever whether they’ve run a marathon or taken a leisurely jog.