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Pentagon's $1B AI shopping spree

PLUS: Meta buries copy-paste pages, Gemini starts making phone calls and AWS fine-tunes models in two hours

Author

Helena Liu
July 18, 2025

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. It’s been a busy 48 hours: the Pentagon just put four GPT-style models on the payroll, Meta threatened to toss copy-paste pages into the algorithmic basement, Google gave Search a “Call the shop for me” button powered by Gemini, and AWS rolled out a lunch-break tool that fine-tunes giant models while your coffee’s still hot.

In today’s TLDR AI:

  • Pentagon inks a $1.2 B “frontier-class” deal with xAI, OpenAI, Anthropic & Google

  • Meta down-ranks copy-paste creators on Facebook, effective 1 August

  • Gemini 2.5 Pro makes price-check phone calls straight from Google Search

  • AWS SageMaker Nova lets you fine-tune foundation models with just 50 examples

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

  • TLDR: The Defense Department’s Chief Digital & AI Office awarded multi-year deals to xAI, OpenAI, Anthropic and Google to prototype frontier-class models for military use.

  • The ceiling tops $1.2 billion, with an initial $250 million task order split among the four labs.

  • First pilots target multilingual intel digests, fleet-maintenance agents and bio-threat red-teaming.

  • Elon Musk says xAI will supply a locked-down “Grok-Gov” model.

  • CDAO chief Craig Martell praised the vendors’ “depth and willingness to share weights behind the SCIF door.”

  • Why it matters: Consumer LLMs just crossed into national-security work, moving the AI arms race from Silicon Valley boardrooms to Pentagon bunkers.

  • TLDR: Following YouTube’s policy shift, Meta will start de-ranking Pages that repeatedly post “unoriginal or barely edited” text, photos or video.

  • Meta’s AI will flag posts that recycle popular memes or news without added context.

  • Repeat offenders lose News-Feed reach and ad revenue; three strikes trigger a 90-day demonetisation.

  • The rule applies worldwide on 1 August; Instagram Reels is not yet included.

  • Creators worry about false positives and limited appeals, while Meta says the move “surfaces authentic voices.”

  • Why it matters: As generative tools flood feeds with look-alike content, platforms are shifting from growth at all costs to originality policing potentially reshaping the creator economy overnight.

  • TLDR: A new “Check availability” button in U.S. search results lets Gemini 2.5 Pro phone local shops, collect prices and text you back.

  • The service combines upgraded Duplex calling with Gemini reasoning to ask follow-ups like “Do you groom Labradoodles?”

  • Business owners can opt out; AI-Mode subscribers get higher usage caps.

  • Google also expanded Deep Search Labs, showing the reasoning path behind complex answers.

  • Why it matters: Search queries now spawn autonomous errands, hinting at an assistant-driven internet where the AI, not you, makes the calls.

  • TLDR: Amazon added a no-code interface that tunes foundation models with as few as 50 labelled examples and auto-deploys them behind a single API.

  • Supported models include Amazon Titan, Meta Llama 3 and Mistral-8×22B, all swap-able without rewriting prompts.

  • Nova logs lineage, hyper-parameters and eval scores into a shareable model card for compliance.

  • Pricing starts at $0.25 per 1k training tokens; new accounts receive $200 in free credits.

  • Beta testers cut fine-tune time from days to under two hours via managed GPU clusters.

  • Why it matters: Cloud giants are turning black-box models into quick-tune, audit-ready products, lowering the barrier between proof-of-concept and production.

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