Chinese research institutions affiliated with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) have reportedly used Meta’s open-source large language model, Llama 2 13B, to create an AI tool with potential military applications. As reported by Reuters, a research paper published in June reveals that researchers, including those from the PLA’s research division, used an early version of Meta’s Llama as the foundation for a tool they refer to as “ChatBIT”. The six Chinese researchers is said to have come from three institutions, including the Academy of Military Science (AMS). PLA-affiliated Chinese institutions ‘customize Meta’s AI’ The report suggests that they customized Meta’s Llama model with unique parameters to develop a military-oriented AI tool designed to gather and process intelligence and deliver accurate and reliable information for operational decision-making. The paper describes how ChatBIT was fine-tuned and “optimized for dialogue and question-answering tasks in the military field.” The model reportedly outperformed some other AI systems, achieving nearly 90% of OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 capabilities.