“The bubble is real,” said the founder of the Pentagon’s Joint AI Center, retired Lt. Gen. Jack Shanahan. “[But] for the DoD, there could be new opportunities to partner with all kinds of tech companies…if their commercial opportunities start to evaporate.”
The potential of “generative AI” is too big to ignore, say retired generals Jack Shanahan and Mike Groen, who each led the Pentagon's Joint AI Center — but for now, its tendency to “hallucinate” and make up information is “a showstopper.”
The US has a narrow edge in its talent pool, its hardware and its algorithms, but China is ahead in accumulating data, deploying applications, and integrating different functions.
JAIC's plan to rapidly grow capabilities, which it will do via a series of monthly updates, reflects the current AI competition with adversaries, including China which has said it plans to dominate AI by 2030. "To a Marine, this is dangerous close," Lt. Gen. Michael Groen says.
Deploying data scientists alongside special ops troops lets them solve intelligence-sharing problems “in minutes or hours,” said Special Operations Command’s first-ever CTO.
Applying AI to everything from predictive maintenance to financial management can save the military billions, the director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center told us – if the Pentagon can reform its cumbersome bureaucracy to exploit rapid advances in technology.
“There's still a lot of folks who believe that, ‘oh, somebody's going to bring a big box of AI and set it on my desk,’” Lt. Gen. Mike Groen, director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, says. “This is not some black box. This is about your insight into the battlefield.”
Today’s huge HQs are slow-moving “rocket magnets” that can’t keep up in 21st century combat, the director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center told us in an exclusive interview. To survive and win, Lt. Gen. Mike Groen said, the military must replace cumbersome manual processes with AI.
“To make AI our military’s future, it must become our military’s present,” says Lt. Gen. Michael Groen, director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, in this exclusive op-ed for Breaking Defense.
“Artificial Intelligence… is not a black box that a contractor is going to deliver to you,” Lt. Gen. Michael Groen says. “It’s commander’s business at every level[:] What data drives your decision-making?”
AI will help commanders make sound decisions so much faster, said Lt. Gen. Michael Groen, that waging war without it will work as well as cavalry charging machine guns on the Western Front.
“Being able to take out 10 targets in rapid succession…that's very exciting. It's awesome,” said Lt. Gen. Michael Groen. “But it's not enough.”