Now is the time we juxtapose. Combining our earlier look at Google AI's ChatBot with the three subsequent posts on various federal government funding opportunities and run through a slightly ADDled mind we arrive here, at the All-Source Intelligence Fusion substack, April 19:
Andrew Moore, who led Google Cloud AI until January, was announced this morning as an advisor to CENTCOM on AI, Robotics, and Cloud Computing.
Andrew Moore spent roughly 17 years alternating between Google and Carnegie Mellon University. Originally joining Google in 2006 to head the company’s Pitsburgh engineering office, he left in 2014 to lead Carnegie Mellon’s computer science department, then abandoned his academic affiliation in 2019 to become the head of Google Cloud’s AI efforts.
But this morning U.S. Central Command — or CENTCOM, which is in charge of U.S. military activities in the middle east — announced Moore had been hired as their first ever advisor on “AI, Robotics, Cloud Computing, and Data Analytics”. And an exclusive interview with Defense One noted that Moore had left Google in January.
Perhaps the only surprise is Moore’s direct hire by CENTCOM, rather than the influential relationship itself. Just two months after rejoining Google in 2019, Moore was announced as a Commissioner of the National Security Commission on AI, as a result of a nomination from former CENTCOM commander Jim Mattis. (At the time of the announcement, Mattis just ended his term as Secretary of Defense for the first half of the Trump administration).
The National Security Commission on AI, or NSCAI, was perhaps the most influential U.S. commission on the intersection between AI and national security that has ever existed. Led by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, its commissioners included the CEOs of Oracle and Amazon as well as current and former CEOs of the primary venture capital arm of U.S. Intelligence — In-Q-Tel. Beyond Schmidt claiming credit for the commission authoring “a hundred pages of legislation” which led to tens of billions in subsidies for the U.S. tech industry through the CHIPS Act, former undersecretary of defense for policy Michèle Flournoy referred to the committee’s 2021 final report as “probably the most important commission report since the 9/11 Commission”.
Beyond lobbying for subsidies for the tech industry, NSCAI was also in charge of recommending how to operationalize the Defense Department’s ‘AI Principles’. Originally drafted by the Defense Innovation Board — which was also chaired by Schmidt — the hope was that codifying ethical principles would prevent the spread of the 2018 protests within Google against contributing to AI drone warfare.
The Executive Director of the board which recommended the defense department’s AI principles, Joshua Marcuse, was soon after directly hired by Google Cloud. And the commission in charge of the principles’ operationalization, NSCAI, was effectively privatized into one of Eric Schmidt’s nonprofits.
While Moore was simultaneously leading Google Cloud’s AI and serving as a Commissioner on NSCAI, Google was awarded one of five reported spots on a CIA cloud computing effort which the agency estimated to be worth “tens of billions”. And, despite its 2018 withdrawal from the Pentagon’s cancelled JEDI cloud computing award, Google is one of the four awardees on the $9 billion ceiling replacement contract, Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability....
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