It's called Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) and the Army thinks it is a potential game changer. GenAI is a type of artificial intelligence that uses generative models to produce new content like images, videos, pictures and so on. Such technology can be used to create so-called "deep fakes" and be used for various types of cybercrime in the wrong hands.
The U.S. Army's Chief Digital & AI officer recently awarded an additional ten million dollars to Ask Sage to push their GenAI toolkit to various combatant commands and Pentagon offices. Ask Sage bills itself as one of the leaders in the GenAI field, and offers services that can help speed up workflow for their customers.
According to Breaking Defense, 19,000 government employees signed up for the Ask Sage toolkit in just a matter of days. The toolkit functions partly as an aggregator that taps into various preexisting AI tools, or large language models, and uses the results to aggregate the best answer.
The GenAI toolkit being used by the military is unique in the sense that it is certified via a process known as FedRAMP to be used to process classified information. “FedRAMP High authorization represents a milestone achievement for Ask Sage and a transformative opportunity for government agencies to dramatically expand Gen AI adoption and use cases securely,” explained Nicolas Chaillan, the founder of Ask Sage, in a press release.
The Army is pursuing a number of novel technologies for the future through programs like Detachment 201: The Army’s Executive Innovation Corps, The Army Innovation Initiative, and by establishing various maker spaces at the unit level for soldiers to tinker with different autonomous systems.