Pentagon AI hub looks to be the 'world's best software company'

WASHINGTON – The leader of the Pentagon's artificial intelligence hub said Tuesday that he wants the office to become the "world's best software company." Nand Mulchandani, acting director of the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, said he wants the DoD to be in a place where service members can write lines of code quickly to do a specific task, receive an authorization to operate quickly and perform the function and throw the code away. If that's the case "we will have won the next war," he said, "because that level of agility and insight and reconfigurability is where we want to be. "We'll be the world's best software company; we happen to be in the military business," Mulchandani said, said on a webinar hosted by the Institute for Security and Technology. The cornerstone of the JAIC's work is the Joint Common Foundation, a recently awarded platform that's designed to provide common artificial intelligence tools and datasets across the Defense Department in an effort to knock down silos.