The United States fears that China’s rapid adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) to revolutionise warfare could accelerate its decline in global influence. The Biden administration has now made efforts to close the gap.
The Pentagon's heightened focus on AI is, in part, a response to international competition in emerging technologies, especially as it perceives China to be making considerable strides on this front. / Photo: AP
"The tremendous pace at which China closed the technological gap has genuinely alarmed US officials," Murat Akca, a researcher focusing on US-China tech rivalry at the National Defense University in Washington D.C., told TRT World.Although the Defense Department has exercised caution, citing the likelihood of these models producing inaccurate information, the Pentagon has taken a keen interest in embedding AI in their work culture and getting ahead of America’s rivals.
He noted that China has recognised the potential of AI in warfare and is putting in far greater efforts than the US in the field of AI. Previously, collaborations between Silicon Valley firms and the Pentagon faced hurdles. A prime example from 2018 involves Google when a significant number of its employees raised objections over Project Maven, a Pentagon initiative that harnessed the tech giant's AI prowess to analyse drone surveillance data. The internal unrest led Google to withdraw from Project Maven.
One example of Silicon Valley's growing involvement with the Pentagon is Saildrone, a company that initially set out to develop autonomous vessels for civilian oceanic exploration. Now, these AI and machine learning-equipped vessels have become essential contractors for the US Navy, aiding in intelligence collection and surveillance in oceans.
Prominent examples of LLMs include OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard. However, the Pentagon has shown no intention towards utilising the existing ones. Instead, it aims to train its own models using its internal data.
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