“We still must validate the sources,” says Lowdon. However the unit’s commanders encouraged the usage of large language models, he says, “because they supply lots more efficiency during a dynamic situation.”
The generative AI tools they used were built by the defense-tech company Vannevar Labs, which in November was granted a production contract value as much as $99 million by the Pentagon’s startup-oriented Defense Innovation Unit with the goal of bringing its intelligence tech to more military units. The corporate, founded in 2019 by veterans of the CIA and US intelligence community, joins the likes of Palantir, Anduril, and Scale AI as a significant beneficiary of the US military’s embrace of artificial intelligence—not just for physical technologies like drones and autonomous vehicles but additionally for software that’s revolutionizing how the Pentagon collects, manages, and interprets data for warfare and surveillance.
Though the US military has been developing computer vision models and similar AI tools, like those utilized in Project Maven, since 2017, the usage of generative AI—tools that may engage in human-like conversation like those built by Vannevar Labs—represent a more moderen frontier.
The corporate applies existing large language models, including some from OpenAI and Microsoft, and a few bespoke ones of its own to troves of open-source intelligence the corporate has been collecting since 2021. The size at which this data is collected is tough to grasp (and a big a part of what sets Vannevar’s products apart): terabytes of information in 80 different languages are hoovered day-after-day in 180 countries. The corporate says it is in a position to research social media profiles and breach firewalls in countries like China to get hard-to-access information; it also uses nonclassified data that’s difficult to get online (gathered by human operatives on the bottom), in addition to reports from physical sensors that covertly monitor radio waves to detect illegal shipping activities.
Vannevar then builds AI models to translate information, detect threats, and analyze political sentiment, with the outcomes delivered through a chatbot interface that’s not unlike ChatGPT. The aim is to supply customers with critical information on topics as varied as international fentanyl supply chains and China’s efforts to secure rare earth minerals within the Philippines.
“Our real focus as an organization,” says Scott Philips, Vannevar Labs’ chief technology officer, is to “collect data, make sense of that data, and help the US make good decisions.”
That approach is especially appealing to the US intelligence apparatus because for years the world has been awash in additional data than human analysts can possibly interpret—an issue that contributed to the 2003 founding of Palantir, an organization with a market value of over $200 billion and known for its powerful and controversial tools, including a database that helps Immigration and Customs Enforcement seek for and track information on undocumented immigrants.
In 2019, Vannevar saw a possibility to make use of large language models, which were then latest on the scene, as a novel solution to the information conundrum. The technology could enable AI not only to gather data but to really talk through an evaluation with someone interactively.
