On an airstrip somewhere in Texas, a swarm of killer jets approaches--controlled by, of all things, a large language model. At a secret US military base located about 50 miles from the Mexican border--exact location: classified--the defense contractor Anduril is testing a remarkable new use for a large language model. I attended one of the first demonstrations last year. From a sun-bleached landing strip, I watched as four jet aircraft, codenamed Mustang, appeared on the horizon to the west and soared over a desolate landscape of boulders and brush. The prototypes, miniaturized for the demo, fell into formation, their engines buzzing as they grew near.

Google has updated its AI ethical guidelines and removed a key pledge not to use the tech in a dangerous way. The company erased the 2018 pledge on Tuesday which stated the tech giant'would not use AI for weapons or surveillance'. The revised policy now shows that Google will only develop AI'responsibly' and in line with'widely accepted principles of international law and human rights.' Google's change has sparked internal backlash as employees called the move'deeply concerning' and that the company should not be involved in'the business of war.' Matt Mahmoudi, Amnesty adviser on AI and human rights, shamed Google for the move, saying the tech giant set a'dangerous precedent.' 'AI-powered technologies could fuel surveillance and lethal killing systems at a vast scale, potentially leading to mass violations and infringing on the fundamental right to privacy,' he added.

In brief AI progresses rapidly. Just months after the release of the most advanced text-to-image models, developers are showing off text-to-video systems. Meta announced a multimodal algorithm named Make-A-Video that allows its users to type a text description of a scene as input and get a short computer-generated animated clip as output, typically depicting what was described. Other types of data, such as an image or a video, can be used as an input prompt, too. The text-to-video system was trained on public datasets, according to a non-peer reviewed paper [PDF] describing the software.

The Pentagon did not adequately document work on its flagship artificial intelligence effort according to a government watchdog report, increasing the risks of lapses in the future. The Department of Defense's inspector general evaluated whether the government monitored contacts in accordance with federal laws and policy for Project Maven, which aimed to accelerate the integration of big data and machine learning. It is frequently held up as the poster child for how DoD is using AI. Army Contracting Command and the Army Research Laboratory partnered with the Pentagon's Algorithmic Warfare Cross-Functional Team to support AI development and award four contracts and a cooperative agreement for Project Maven. ECS Federal scored three of the contracts, with Morse Corporation securing the fourth and Carnegie Mellon University receiving a cooperative agreement.

In 2018, thousands of Google employees protested a Pentagon contract dubbed Project Maven that used the company's artificial intelligence technology to analyze drone surveillance footage. Google said it wouldn't renew the contract and announced guiding principles for future AI projects that forbid work on weapons and surveillance projects "violating internationally accepted norms." At the same time, Google made clear it would still seek defense contracts. "While we are not developing AI for use in weapons," CEO Sundar Pichai wrote, "we will continue our work with governments and the military in many other areas." In the three years since, Google has stayed true to his word.

Harnessing artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies has become the new arms race among the great powers, a Hudson Institute panel on handling big data in military operations said Monday. Speaking at the online forum, Richard Schultz, director of the international security program in the Fletcher School at Tufts University, said, "that's the way [Russian President Vladimir] Putin looks at it. I don't think we have a choice" but to view it the same way. He added in answer to a question that "the data in information space is enormous," so finding tools to filter out what's not necessary is critical. U.S. Special Operations Command is already using AI to do what in the old days was called political or psychological warfare, in addition to targeting, he added.

First of all, I want to state for the record that I have never played a video game that involved violence or war. I think the last time I played a "video game" was Flight Simulator. As a result, I suspect some readers are much more familiar with intensive and fanciful warfare than I am. Still, recently, I've been part of discussions with the Department of Defense and organizations that advise, consult and criticize the DoD on the topic AI in warfare. It is a complicated issue to introduce AI ethics with the violence and killing of war.

Despite a summer of controversy surrounding the use of artificial intelligence for military purposes, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency says it has no problem garnering interest in its AI research projects. "We don't see that we are having problems engaging with industry," Valerie Browning, director of the Defense Science office at DARPA, said on a Washington Post event panel last week. DARPA recently announced a $2 billion campaign called "AI Next" aimed at "third wave" AI research. The goal is to get the technology to a place where machines adapt to changing situations the way human intelligence does. Responding to a question about whether and how Google's decision to end its work with Pentagon AI initiative Project Maven has impacted DARPA, Browning downplayed any effect.

Harnessing artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies has become the new arms race among the great powers, a Hudson Institute panel on handling big data in military operations said Monday. Speaking at the online forum, Richard Schultz, director of the international security program in the Fletcher School at Tufts University, said, "that's the way [Russian President Vladimir] Putin looks at it. I don't think we have a choice" but to view it the same way. He added in answer to a question that "the data in information space is enormous," so finding tools to filter out what's not necessary is critical. U.S. Special Operations Command is already using AI to do what in the old days was called political or psychological warfare, in addition to targeting, he added.

Thankfully, in many cases, we live up to it. But our present digital reality is quite different, even sobering. Fighting terrorists for nearly 20 years after 9/11, we remained a flip-phone military in what is now a smartphone world. Infrastructure to support a robust digital force remains painfully absent. Consequently, service members lead personal lives digitally connected to almost everything and military lives connected to almost nothing.