The military will use Silicon Valley’s approach to quickly field imperfect products, then rapidly improve them based on user feedback.

Before the Air Force will trust AI to pick out targets, Gen. Holmes said, it has to get smarter than a human three-year-old.

USDI Kari Bingen says that DoD’s mission “is hampered when we have to pay in time and money analysts and experts to manually translate data files … to makes systems and data interoperable because of proprietary data standards and formats.”

“He said you’ve got tremendous people, you prototype pretty effectively, and you’re absolutely terrible — he had some more colorful words than that — for machine learning,” Gen. Thomas said. “It gave me a spark … and turned me into a zealot.”

The Air Force can be an “angel investor” for some startups, said Will Roper, the service’s top acquisition official.

“The major challenge for the US is China,” CNA analyst Larry Lewis said. “They are approaching the use of AI just like the US approached going to the moon in the sixties.”

      In recent weeks, two events demonstrated the promise of and concern over the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI). At the #AI4Good Summit in Geneva, attendees reviewed the many ways AI can help humanity in medicine, education, economic and law enforcement applications, to name a few. Meanwhile, Google withdrew from a Pentagon project called… Keep reading →

Despite its ethical objections to helping the Pentagon, Google indirectly and inadvertently assists the Chinese military, which has tentacles into the tech giant’s ventures in China, former deputy secretary of defense Robert Work said.

As the Pentagon and the defense industry rush to keep up with the shift to great power competition and the fight for tech workers rushing for Silicon Valley, the idea of technology incubators is catching fire.

Project Maven has made huge strides in its first year, but the key is remaining open to updates from whoever has the best idea for new algorithms, and new code, a military leader says.