Meta develops an augmented reality headset for the army | Press review n°8
What to take away from the news on artificial intelligence during the week of May 26 to June 1, 2025.
Welcome to the eighth press review of Artificial reality. I publish a selection of the latest important developments in AI every week. Have a good read!
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Meta develops an augmented reality headset for the army
The company which owns Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp and Threads is partnering with weapons manufacturer Anduril to create several extended reality devices for the U.S. army.
In a press release published on Thursday, Anduril explains that these devices will provide soldiers with enhanced perception and enable intuitive control of autonomous platforms on the battlefield. They will use Meta’s AI models and will be developed by the multinational’s research center Reality Labs.
These augmented reality objects will integrate with Anduril’s Lattice platform, an AI-powered command and control system that collects data from thousands of sources to provide real-time battlefield intelligence.
The new system developed by Meta and Anduril is called EagleEye, specifies The Wall Street Journal. It will carry sensors that enhance soldiers’ hearing and vision, allowing them to detect drones flying miles away or to sight hidden targets.
In the new episode of the podcast Core Memory published on Thursday, Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey says that the first prototype of EagleEye will be delivered to the Pentagon this year, Bloomberg reports. He compared its functionalities to what a player wears in the video game Halo: a heads-up display built into the goggles which provides information on targets and locations, plus an AI assistant named Cortana which relays critical directions.
The two companies have jointly bid on an army contract for extended reality hardware devices, worth up to about $100 million. This contract, which is intended to vet headset prototypes, is part of a larger $22 billion AI wearables project of the army. Anduril took control of this project at the beginning of the year, after it was initially awarded to Microsoft in 2018.
Meta, whose stated mission is to “build the futur of human interactions”, has made a decisive and controversial step by starting to develop military AI with Anduril. In November, the company had already announced that it would allow the U.S. government to use its AI models. It has also recruited former Pentagon staff in recent months.
In addition to Meta and Microsoft, other big tech companies also work on military applications of artificial intelligence. Google was part of Maven, a Pentagon project which uses AI to help soldiers identify targets in videos from drones. After many protests from its employees who didn’t want to develop a technology which could be used for lethal purposes, the multinational decided not to renew this contract in 2018. However, it has recently dropped its pledge to not apply AI to weapons or surveillance.
OpenAI, known for its chatbot ChatGPT, also works with weapons company Anduril. In December 2024, they announced that they had entered into a partnership to add OpenAI’s technology to systems used by the U.S. army. Just like Google, OpenAI first barred its AI from being used in military and warfare before it changed its policies. Anthropic, which owns the chatbot Claude, also gives access to its AI to the U.S. military.
Seven important news this week
Why this leading AI CEO is warning the tech could cause mass unemployment (CNN)
Why Anthropic’s New AI Model Sometimes Tries to ‘Snitch’ (Wired)
Anthropic debuts Claude conversational voice mode on mobile that searches your Google Docs, Drive, Calendar (VentureBeat)
OpenAI: The power and the pride (MIT Technology Review)
Your chatbot friend might be messing with your mind (The Washington Post)
xAI to pay Telegram $300M to integrate Grok into the chat app (TechCrunch)
Developer Builds Tool That Scrapes YouTube Comments, Uses AI to Predict Where Users Live (404 Media)
Read the other articles of the week I have selected by clicking here.
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Hundreds of millions of unemployed people because of AI?
The CEO of Anthropic, one of the largest artificial intelligence companies in the world, worries about the massive impact AI will soon have on the job market.
In an interview with Axios published on Wednesday, Dario Amodei considers that AI could replace half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years. He adds that this technology could spike unemployment to 10-20% within the same period, while it was at 4.2% in April in the United States. Axios journalists Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen qualify this potential situation as a “mass elimination of jobs” and a “job apocalypse”.
In an interview on CNN published on Friday, Dario Amodei shares his concerns with journalist Anderson Cooper.
Seven important videos this week
Palmer Luckey and Meta Make Peace to Make War (Core Memory)
AI Leader Dire Warning: White Collar Bloodbath Is Here! (Breaking Points)
Fake AI News Clips Flood Internet (Breaking Points)
We Made a Film With AI. You’ll Be Blown Away—and Freaked Out (The Wall Street Journal)
A.I. is a Religious Cult with Karen Hao (Adam Conover)
Google CEO Sundar Pichai on the future of search, AI agents, and selling Chrome (The Verge)
The complete history of Artificial Intelligence: Alan Turing to ChatGPT (Matt Wolfe)
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The impact of AI on cognition
In the new episode of The Most Interesting Thing in A.I., The Atlantic CEO Nicholas Thompson talks with Nita Farahany, a law and philosophy professor at Duke University, in the United States, and a neurotechnology expert.
They address the role of artificial intelligence in brain-computer interfaces, the dangers of neurotechnologies, the impact of AI on cognition and the risks of cerebral atrophy by using chatbots.
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Have a good week,
Arnaud
