Скачать или смотреть Project Maven Amazon And Microsoft Scored $50 Million In Pentagon

After Google decided to quit working on Project Maven in 2018 thanks to staff protests, rivals Amazon and Microsoft quietly took on Department of Defense contracts worth $50 million to help the military identify objects from drone and other aerial footage, according to a new analysis of federal government contract records. Contracts discovered by Jack Poulson, founder of big tech monitor Tech Inquiry and a former Google AI researcher, show Microsoft scored $30 million and Amazon Web Services $20 million in subcontract awards that were part of three overall deals between the Pentagon and ECS Federal, Google’s partner and reseller for Project Maven. The subcontracts do not mention Maven but others under the ESC deal do, linking them directly with the Pentagon project. That, according to Poulson, indicates that the tech giants have been working on Maven since they signed those deals, Microsoft starting in 2019 and Amazon in 2020. Even if the contracts didn’t specify Maven, the tech giants were asked to provide similar technologies to those Google was set to create before the staff revolt, says Poulson, who provided his analysis to Forbes ahead of wider publication. Back in 2018, Gizmodo reported that Google was providing software to help the Defense Department with “object recognition on unclassified data,” which would have AI software identify objects from drone footage. Microsoft and Amazon were also contracted to ingest visual data and make sense of it. The latest contracts unearthed by Poulson show Microsoft, in multimillion-dollar deals, was asked to provide tools that could analyze data from “full motion video,” as well as “software and algorithms to automate and augment the analysis of Wide Area Motion Imagery (WAMI) data.” WAMI is a term used in the surveillance industry that refers to images taken from above - typically from a drone, plane or satellite - for intelligence purposes. Full motion video (FMV) also typically refers to images taken from airborne cameras. Both FMV and WAMI, according to U. S. government documentation, are often used together for wide-area surveillance from the skies. Amongst its contracts, Amazon was tasked with developing “models for object detection and classification” for “full motion video” and infrared data. Another of the world’s biggest tech companies, IBM, was contracted to provide “statistical reasoning models, combined with Artificial Intelligence,” as part of a $1.7 million deal. The money for Google in the Project Maven contract, a reported $15 million, was never large by the standards of a company with yearly revenues above $150 billion. But it led to a rare, and public, spat between Google and its employees in 2018 with 4,000 signing a petition demanding that the Mountain View giant pledge never to “build warfare technology.”That was followed by protests over other military and government contracts at rival tech giants.


All data is taken from the source: http://forbes.com
Article Link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbr...


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