One thing I don't hear a lot of people talking about are ML/AI systems in the hands of government agencies. We know that the military and NSA are often ahead in many technologies but when it comes to AI the assumption seems to be that the industry is moving faster than the government. Is that really a safe assumption?
The goverment is openly using autonomous systems to pilot drones, but what else are they leveraging AI for? Threat analysis? Logistics? Weapons optimization? PsyOps?
The DoE is openly a very large consumer of GPUs. What about the military?
You can get a glimpse by scrolling websites like: https://www.darpa.mil/opencatalog?ppl=view200&sort=title&ocF... [.mil] and looking at DARPA and Office of Naval Research sponsored ML/AI research. The military has been deeply involved with ML/AI research since its inception, and it is near impossible to avoid first - or second degree involvement, if active in ML/AI.
The military wants: automated chat agents/web users that can be sent to dark web markets and hacker IRC channels and report back intelligence. Common sense inference from security and drone footage: predict who the killer is when watching a movie. Author deanonimization and cross-device tracking. Global-scale 99.9%+ accurate face detection.
The Dutch Intelligence Agency organizes a yearly competition with difficult codes to crack. [1] It is rare for someone to answer all questions correctly. The answers require logic, creativity, common sense, linguistics, causal inference, spatial reasoning, expertise, analysis, and systematic thinking. I bet the military would be mighty interested in an automated problem solver for that. And mighty scared some other country gets there first.
The goverment is openly using autonomous systems to pilot drones, but what else are they leveraging AI for? Threat analysis? Logistics? Weapons optimization? PsyOps?
The DoE is openly a very large consumer of GPUs. What about the military?