AI's Data Hunger Will Drive Intelligence Collection

WASHINGTON: Artificial intelligence has an insatiable appetite for data – but if you feed it the wrong kind of data, it's going to choke. To get clean-enough data in large enough quantities for machine-learning algorithms to actually learn something from it, officials say that the intelligence community needs to change how drones, satellites, and other sensors performs their mission every day. The turning point will be "when we start seeing collection requirements … for the production of training-quality datasets, versus the support of a tactical operation," said David Spirk, who became the Defense Department's Chief Data Officer in June and is now finalizing the DoD's new data strategy. "I don't know that we've entirely made that turn yet, but I think we're talking about it." For example, the US has collected vast amounts of data on the Central Command theater, said Spirk, who served in Afghanistan himself as a Marine Corps intel specialist.