24 August 2024

Army wraps up 100-day sprint, plots next steps for AI

Jared Serbu

Fresh off of 100 days of “sprints” designed to eliminate stumbling blocks toward artificial intelligence adoption, the Army says it’s developed a clearer picture of what it wants to achieve between now and 2026, when it plans to become the first military service with a formal program of record specifically for AI.

Next up will be another 500 days of planning work as the Army builds out what it learned during the first series of sprints, and also adds two new objectives to its study plan: one initiative dubbed “Break AI,” and another called “Counter AI.”

The Break AI line of effort is based on the assumption that the technology space will continue to move toward what researchers call artificial general intelligence — models whose behavior might resemble human thinking — rather than current technologies that tend to generate predictable outcomes, given the same data inputs.

“It’s about the notion of how we actually test and evaluate artificial intelligence,” Young Bang, the principal deputy assistant secretary of the Army for acquisition, logistics and technology told attendees at AFCEA’s TechNet conference in Augusta, Ga. Wednesday. “As we move towards AGI, how do we actually test something that we don’t know what the outcome of, or what the behaviors are going to be? You can’t test it the way that we test deterministic models, and we need industry’s help here.”

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