Some of the more popular models (NIPRGPT, the various DREN models) are “soft banned” and DoD is in need of a unified solution. MSFT’s GCC HIGH and GovCloud implementations have been slow to materialize. But more to your point - everyone is using LLM’s to pick up the slack from layoffs. Im sitting in meetings and watching my gov customers generate documentation and proposals everyday. Everything the commercial world uses AI for the US gov is doing the same. Cant directly speak to targeting but you can bet your ass there are 100 different offensive projects trying to integrate AI into ISR work and the like.
Planatir has an older demo of their chat like interface showcasing targeting selection, battle plans and formations, other advice. Kind of creepy, I assume it’s much more capable now.
Yeah, tons. SIGNT / HUMINT analysis. After action report summaries. war gaming to optimize deterrence. human machine teaming. LLM-in-the-loop for warfighters. rapid code gen in field deployments for units to spin up software solutions. The list is endless, imho.
The DoD does plenty of things beyond putting boots on the ground. They’re the world’s largest employer. They have all the same boring problems that any employer has at gigantic scale.
Such things are already in use in Palestine, integrating it into the broader US military will take some work.
One main function is to enable sloppier targeting while easing the PTSD load on soldiers, i.e. allowing for more criminal and genocidal operations without immediate mutiny or desertions.
In a sense you can make the computer more convincing to the operator and have it tag more people as supposedly threatening, e.g. to up the amount of supposed threats in a gathering from one actually militant person to several based on aggregation of sentiment analysis, network analysis and so on.
You might understand that you're looking at a wedding, but the computer says several people there are 'red' because of social media posts, who they had lunch with a while ago and so on, raising the threshold for when so called collateral starts to hurt your operators badly enough to be a problem.
And then you have the dream of autonomous swarms of machines doing murder, which I'm sure the current US regime is salivating over and likely hope that these corporations will be able to help bring about eventually. Imagine going from a cop street murder that gets bad press and court proceedings and so on, to instead having to handle a set of Jira tickets due to a supposed bug.
why? it could help them asses threats, civilians / avoid collateral damage. Like any weapon or technology, it depends on its use. warfighter is the modern industry / academic term used for "soldier."
More like hey, ai, sit here watching uav and security camera footage from 10,000 feeds and flag short clips for human review if you think they show military activity.
Automatically generated, native sounding, propaganda at scale - capable of interacting in real time. This was always the MIC money endgame for LLMs. This is also probably why they are enlisting tech execs from Meta, OpenAI, etc.
No. People see "defense" and immediately think everything is a weapon, for some reason. The DoD is still an organization with exactly the same business functions as wherever you work. This is likely going to be something more or less like the ChatGPT for Gov thing. You ask it to summarize videos and articles, review a document you're writing, spruce it up, whatever the rest of you are doing with LLMs, but you're allowed to use it from a locked down DoD workstation that can't access public web services.
> “This contract, with a $200 million ceiling, will bring OpenAI’s industry-leading expertise to help the Defense Department identify and prototype how frontier AI can transform its administrative operations, from improving how service members and their families get health care, to streamlining how they look at program and acquisition data, to supporting proactive cyber defense,”
Translated - they'll hand out GPT access to a bunch of service members and administrators. Except the UI will have a big DoD logo and words like "SECURE" and "CLASSIFIED" will be displayed on it a few dozen times.
You realize that the DoD has a huge amount of normal business work like logistics, project management, people management, benefits management, etc? Right?
The United States Military (Waterhouse has decided) is first and foremost an unfathomable network of typists and file clerks, secondarily a stupendous mechanism for moving stuff from one part of the world to another, and last and least a fighting organization. —Cryptonomicon
“Under this award, the performer will develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains,” the Defense Department said.
Knowing the DoD, I bet it's not. I bet they just want their own secure servers or some sort of corporate data/encryption management, and they're willing to pay out the nose to not have to use asksage or some terrible DoD friendly clone
“National security challenges” is incredibly broad, providing the right size of boots to USCG rescue swimmers could be considered a national security challenge.
I would guess it’s for mass surveillance. Even just the ability to extract names and entities from audio, video, and text on every piece of public media would be useful.
> The National Security Agency (NSA) is an intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense, under the authority of the director of national intelligence (DNI).
> William J. Hartman is a United States Army lieutenant general who has served as the acting commander of United States Cyber Command, director of the National Security Agency,
They’re staffed by military people (alongside civilians) and their commander is always military — because much of what they do (abroad) could be construed as acts of war.
To attempt to make sense of all my after action reports? kidding
Maybe one potential use could be to drink from the firehose of data and then try to create summary bullet-point reports for the higher ups instead of relying on data filtering up the chain of command in the old game of telephone. At least that is what I would use if for. Getting that data in nearly real-time in an accurate presentation would be priceless.
I do not have the slightest idea how they will secure all this data if going to a 3rd party like OpenAI unless they have their own self hosted version of it on their own mainframes. If that data is going to live in a 3rd party they need to secure their systems in a magical way systems has never been secured. They would have to cast some seriously powerful protection spells.
