Army Reserve Soldiers with the 75th U.S. Army Reserve Innovation Command’s Army Applications Group and Support Group Artificial Intelligence and Data Team participate in Code-A-Thon 24, Aug. 1, 2024, at Fort Liberty, North Carolina. (Photo by Sgt. 1st Class Matthew Chlosta / 75th US Army Reserve Innovation Command)
WASHINGTON — The Army’s artificial intelligence accelerator, Project Linchpin, is working with open source software firm Red Hat to unveil an initial version of its AI development architecture as early as next week, product lead Bharat Patel said.
The architecture, in essence, is a set of common technical standards — Application Programming Interfaces (API), data labeling protocols, and so on — to ensure that AIs built for the Army by different vendors are all compatible.
“We are defining some of these APIs and some of these architectures with Red Hat now, [with] an open source project being dropped end of November,” Patel told the Red Hat Government Symposium here on Tuesday. “This is going to be one of our first attempts at a public-private partnership.”
By creating a level playing field for competition among innovative companies of different sizes, this “open architecture” should allow the Army to use whichever algorithms it likes best into its suite of AI software, fully confident the different products will work together, Patel and other officials explained in public comments and interviews with Breaking Defense.
“This space moves so fast that we can’t build a strategy that relies on one company or two,” Patel told the conference. “We actually need to work on the standards that allow us to create more of a competitive architecture that people just kind of plug and play. … We want to really get after some of the non-traditional small businesses.”
The problem with tapping into this rapidly expanding and evolving ecosystem of innovators is that, frankly, it’s kind of chaotic.
“It’s like the Wild, Wild West when it comes to AI right now,” Patel told Breaking Defense. “Project Linchpin’s main focus is to be able to standardize a lot of how we deliver AI.”
That chaos isn’t just in the private sector: There are plenty of ad hoc, incompatible AI efforts within the military itself.
“One of the trends we’ve seen across the Army is data is in pretty tough shape,” said Col. Chris Anderson, the Army’s product manager for Intelligence Systems & Analytics, who works closely with Patel. “It’s spread out all over the place, [and] it’s not labeled.” Such disorganized data (the polite term is “unstructured”) is difficult to do even basic analysis on, let alone train an AI algorithm.
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Even when data is labeled, Anderson told Breaking Defense, the labeling may be inconsistent, idiosyncratic, or otherwise unintelligence to any human or machine beside the original users.
For example, early on in Project Linchpin, “one of the pilots that we did was in response to a real-world need in CENTCOM,” he recounted. “A unit approached us and said, ‘We really need to find this specific target.’ And they had a tranche of data that they had labeled, [but] that the labeled data was not very good.”
Project Linchpin and a contractor spent a lot of time and effort relabeling the unit’s data so they could train an AI model to analyze it. But when they provided the trained-up model to the unit, it didn’t work properly on their computers, Anderson said, because model had been trained on machines using one type of chip (GPUs, common in the AI world) but the unit’s devices used a different kind (CPUs).
To bring order to this chaos of incompatible systems, “we want to partner with industry to help define these standards,” Patel emphasized. “We don’t want to be the government and be like, ‘Here’re our standards, you must comply.’”
So step one was figuring out a common ground that different companies and the Army procurement system could all live with.
“We’ve been working really closely with ASA(ALT) [the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Acquisition, Logistics, and Technology] on what are the standards we are going to implement within the pipeline and how does that feed into Army-level policy,” Anderson said. “The [Linchpin] team, they’ve done 500 one-on-one sessions with industry partners — multiple hours [apiece] — and evaluated, I think, 300 responses from industry, and the majority of those were either small businesses or non-traditionals.”
“Really early on we learned, there’s no turnkey solution, there’s no one size fits all,” Anderson said. “It’s changing every day. … We’ve got to be able to bring in third-party applications and services quickly, we’ve got to be able to offboard them quickly when something better comes along.”
At Linchpin, “they don’t want a closed ecosystem, they don’t want black box closed-source contributors,” said Michael Zizza, who handle the Army account at Red Hat. “They need … interoperability.”
Red Hat was well suited to help develop such an architecture, Zizza told Breaking Defense, because as a vendor of open-source software, “the code is free,” and what you’re paying Red Hat for is tech support. It’s an experienced intermediary between the chaotic creativity of the software development world and the order required by large corporations and government agencies.
Project Linchpin originally contracted with both Red Hat and consulting firm Booz Allen to “flesh out” the guiding principles behind the architecture, Patel told Breaking Defense. (In software development jargon, the final version of those principles is Traceability, Observability, Orchestration, Replaceability and automated Consumption, TOORC). From there, Patel said, Linchpin worked through the Army Research laboratory to set up a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with Red Hat, which the firm announced last month.
“We’re kind of in the early stages now,” Zizza said, “but we’re looking at specific things like architecture diagrams [and] an open API specification.”
Carley Welch contributed to this story.
