The memorandum’s directive to the CDAO to make available vendors’ “latest models” within 30 days of their public release as a “primary procurement criterion” is striking, too, and represents a sharp break from the days when it took Microsoft 18 months to make GPT-4 available in the Azure Government Top Secret cloud (and air-gapped at that). The memorandum seemingly embraces and extends this dynamic, adopting a stance in which the DOD is to shore up the peripheries of privately developed technologies (e.g., constructing AI and autonomous system evaluation standards) and identify use-cases for them within the DOD (e.g., internal experimentation, AI agents for enterprise workflows). The improvements in generative AI models over time are primarily an improvement in their surface-level alignment with human judgments: most humans accept that the Earth revolves around the Sun and, lo and behold, this is ‘discovered’ by the model during training (should the internet be populated with the reverse idea, the model would ‘discover’ geocentricism).
Author: Vincent Carchidi
Published at: 2026-02-02 21:00:00
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