ChatGPT, the powerful new artificial intelligence tool from OpenAI that can answer questions, chat with humans, and generate text, has dominated headlines in the past few months. The tool is advanced enough to pass law school exams (though with fairly low scores), but it has also veered into strange conversations and has shared misinformation. It also highlights an important area that companies using or thinking about using AI need to confront: how to embrace AI in a way that doesn't harm humans. "Leadership involves absolutely centering the human and being rigorous before releasing into the wild things that affect these humans," saidRenée Richardson Gosline, a senior lecturer and principal research scientist at MIT Sloan. "Having the courage and ethics to say we want to cultivate a system and a relationship with our customers whereby we don't simply always extract, but we also share value -- that's what leads to loyalty in the long term."

Investments in cybersecurity and artificial intelligence efforts will likely continue to increase as overall defense spending remains flat in future years, but a worsening pandemic could dampen those projections, according to new analysis from the Professional Services Council's latest research on federal budgets. The Defense Department is largely expected to keep pace with current budget levels, potentially seeing very modest 2% growth to topline budgets, PSC's report projects. That trend could also extend to IT modernization efforts. Senate Appropriators weighed in today on 2021 spending, proposing a $696 billion defense budget, slightly above 2020 levels and slightly below the Trump administration's funding request. The House passed their funding bill in July at $694.6 billion.

The Pentagon's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center is focused on overlaying artificial intelligence tools on the military's mega information-sharing platform effort, called Joint All Domain Command and Control. Nand Mulchandani, JAIC's acting director, told reporters during a July 8 news briefing the center is "spending a lot of time and resources focused on building the AI components on top of JADC2," which is a patchwork quilt of platforms to improve coordination and information sharing. This involves figuring out how to build AI components, such as data, AI modeling, training and deployment, across all domains including cyber, he said. Mulchandani said JAIC is also investing in cognitive assistance technologies, helping human operators make better decisions, using "predictive analytics or picking out particular things of interest, and those types of information overload cleanup." Working through objections to the Defense Department's use of AI in weapons systems is still a chief concern, however.

The Pentagon's Joint Artificial Intelligence Center is focused on overlaying artificial intelligence tools on the military's mega information-sharing platform effort, called Joint All Domain Command and Control. Nand Mulchandani, JAIC's acting director, told reporters during a July 8 news briefing the center is "spending a lot of time and resources focused on building the AI components on top of JADC2," which is a patchwork quilt of platforms to improve coordination and information sharing. This involves figuring out how to build AI components, such as data, AI modeling, training and deployment, across all domains including cyber, he said. Mulchandani said JAIC is also investing in cognitive assistance technologies, helping human operators make better decisions, using "predictive analytics or picking out particular things of interest, and those types of information overload cleanup." Working through objections to the Defense Department's use of AI in weapons systems is still a chief concern, however.

This article originally appeared in the April 23, 2018 issue of SpaceNews magazine. The tech industry has software tools that can pore over a thousand images per minute and identify objects with 99-percent accuracy. The Pentagon badly wants this technology, and sees it as essential to military combat capability as bombs and missiles. "How can I leverage the innovation happening in AI?" asked Gen. Stephen Wilson, vice chief of staff of the U.S. Air Force. The military and intelligence agencies have sought to bring artificial intelligence into areas like data mining and autonomous vehicles.

Mobvoi, the Chinese artificial intelligence startup backed by Google and Volkswagen, launched a chatbot on Tuesday that can connect with voice-activated smart home devices, as the company ramps up its efforts to turn from a niche player to being the future Amazon Alexa or Google Home in China. The Beijing-based startup founded in 2012 by a group of former Google engineers sees smart homes as one of the top priorities to leverage its voice recognition and natural language processing technology after receiving a US$180 million investment from German auto maker Volkswagen earlier this month. Smart homes are seen by technology giants around the world as one of the key directions for the application of artificial intelligence in people's everyday life. In the United States, Alexa, the robotic voice assistant behind Amazon's Echo has already allowed people to dim bedroom lights and play song lists through speech. In China, online search giant Baidu recently acquired a Chinese start-up that developed an artificial intelligence-based voice assistant to push further into smart home devices.

Apple is planning an expansion of its Seattle operations, which primarily center on artificial intelligence and machine learning. The company is in the process of moving the engineering team from Turi, the AI-focused startup that the company acquired last year, into the Two Union Square skyscraper. Apple currently leases two floors of the building, and will lease more to accommodate its Seattle expansion. "We're trying to find the best people who are excited about AI and machine learning -- excited about research and thinking long term but also bringing those ideas into products that impact and delight our customers," said computer scientist Carlos Guestrin, Apple director of machine learning. "The bar is high, but we're going to be hiring as quickly as we can find people that meet our high bar, which is exciting."

"Most current advanced driver assistance systems based on radar and cameras are not capable of accurately detecting and classifying objects – such as cars, pedestrians or bicycles – at a level required for autonomous driving," said Sachin Lawande, president and CEO of Visteon, a leading global cockpit electronics supplier. "We need to achieve virtually 100 percent accuracy for autonomous driving, which will require innovative solutions based on deep machine learning technology. Our Silicon Valley team, with its focus on machine learning software development, will be a critical part of our autonomous driving technology initiative." Visteon's recently opened facility in the heart of Silicon Valley will house a team of engineers specializing in artificial intelligence and machine learning. The center is located close to the West Coast offices of various automakers and tech companies, as well as Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley – two of the leading universities for artificial intelligence and deep learning in the U.S. In addition to leading Visteon's artificial intelligence efforts, the Silicon Valley office will play a key role in delivering control systems, localization and vision processing – interpreting live camera data and converting it to information required for autonomous driving.