Pentagon grapples with growth of artificial intelligence. (Graphic by Breaking Defense, original brain graphic via Getty)
WASHINGTON — The Air Force and Space Force announced a new generative artificial intelligence tool Monday, called the Non-classified Internet Protocol Generative Pre-training Transformer, or NIPRGPT.
The goal of NIPRGPT, an AI chatbot with human-like responses, is to help the Department of the Air Force learn how AI can advance access to information and determine if generative AI is necessary within the DAF.
“Our recent GenAI Roundtables with industry and academia have shown us this is an actively growing field,” Venice Goodwine, DAF chief information officer, said in a department announcement.
“Now is the time to give our Airmen and Guardians the flexibility to develop the necessary skills in parallel. There are multiple modernization efforts going on right now across the federal government and within the DAF to get tools in the hands of the workforce. This tool is another one of those efforts.”
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The platform will help airmen and guardians with correspondence, research and coding tasks, all while being connected to a secure online environment, per the announcement.
Though the platform is still undergoing development, NIPRGPT has shown promising results, Chandra Donelson, DAF acting chief data and artificial intelligence officer, said during a media roundtable Monday.
“So first and foremost, I truly believe the greatest contributions and innovators can make is to create other innovators, and to see what guardians and airmen have done here with the NIPRGBT capability is phenomenal,” she said, according to an audio transcript of the roundtable obtained by Breaking Defense.
Alexis Bonnell, chief information officer and director of digital capabilities at the Air Force Research Laboratory, said that the Air Force has yet to pick a specific vendor or approach as it builds the criterion for NIPRGBT.
However, as servicemembers begin using NIPRGBT, the department plans to work with commercial partners to test whether the DAF has a real need for generative AI.
“We’re hoping that not only will this kick off the curiosity and experimentation that we can see in our users, but it will also, for those providers that have models, it will give us a way to actually test those. We fully expect that some models are going to be great at some use cases and not so great at others,” Bonnel said during the roundtable.
NIPRGPT is derived from the Dark Saber software platform developed at the Air Force Research Laboratory Information Directorate. Dark Saber is a project comprised of Air Force and Space Force servicemembers with the mission of creating next-generation, deployable software and capabilities.
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