Here's Bubbles, the water safety robot, as depicted by a generative-AI tool prompted by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Andrew Byrne / U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Pittsburgh District
The Pentagon's generative-AI task force is trying to answer a lot of questions
How should new tools be used? Where should the actual computing take place? How much will this all cost? And that's just the start.
The Defense Department's task force to explore the use of generative artificial intelligence will help officials craft guidelines and identify infrastructure needs for emerging capabilities, according to the head of the Pentagon’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, or CDAO.
The initiative, known as Task Force Lima, was launched last August with an 18-month lifespan and the stated goal of helping the department use AI “in a responsible and strategic manner."
The task force is currently “providing its recommendations up to me," Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer Radha Plumb said an event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies on Monday.
Plumb said this guidance will help CDAO “prioritize the use cases along which we want to begin our experimentation journey on AI adoption, but also to help us understand what the guidelines and guardrails we need to put in place [are] as we begin testing and using generative AI.”
Plumb said CDAO’s role in this effort is to develop limits on using AI “to allow experimentation in a federated way inside the DOD ecosystem.”
“That's really what's going to let us better understand and realize the promise of generative AI,” she said, adding that it will allow DOD personnel to undertake “responsible risk-taking” within clearly defined parameters.
Beyond developing guidelines for the Pentagon’s use of generative AI, Plumb said the task force will also help inform CDAO’s understanding of the systems needed to power and maintain the tools.
“These generative-AI models are hugely infrastructure-dependent,” she said. “They depend on a tremendous amount of compute, which has energy requirements.They depend on, for DOD, thinking about cloud versus on-premises compute capabilities and what the transport looks like.”
Plumb said CDAO is working with DOD’s chief information officer to understand “what does it mean to make the department ready for this” and how those efforts are likely to shape future budget requests.
Beyond testing out potential generative-AI capabilities, DOD directed Task Force Lima to provide officials with best practice guidance and recommendations for adopting the tools.
U.S. Navy Capt. Manuel Xavier Lugo, who leads the task force, said at an event in February that one of the initiative’s goals is to help craft “a transition plan to where those pieces need to go” across DOD.