This article originally appeared on Forbes. The concept of artificial intelligence is nothing new, yet the hype around it continues to grow. According to CB Insights (via Forbes), AI startups have raised a record $7.4 billion raised in the second quarter of 2019 alone. The excitement does have merit. Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to automate many of the tedious tasks humans perform now.

The concept of artificial intelligence is nothing new, yet the hype around it continues to grow. According to CB Insights (via Forbes), AI startups have raised a record $7.4 billion raised in the second quarter of 2019 alone. The excitement does have merit. Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to automate many of the tedious tasks humans perform now. It could open up new ways to approach problems while saving users time and money.

Microsoft's blog post stated that if granted the contract, the company will give differential employees an option to "work on a different project or team". Microsoft said Friday it is prepared to provide its technology to the US military, including for a massive cloud computing project, despite ethics concerns among some of its employees and others in Silicon Valley. Microsoft president Brad Smith agrees. Throughout the piece, Smith continued to walk a fine line between patriotic duty to support the US military, while carefully conceding that there will be different opinions in a large and diverse company population (some of whom aren't USA citizens). The company, he said, is already working with experts to help it do so.

Last July, 13 U.S. military commanders and technology executives met at the Pentagon's Silicon Valley outpost, two miles from Google headquarters. It was the second meeting of an advisory board set up in 2016 to counsel the military on ways to apply technology to the battlefield. Milo Medin, a Google vice president, turned the conversation to using artificial intelligence in war games. Eric Schmidt, Google's former boss, proposed using that tactic to map out strategies for standoffs with China over the next 20 years. A few months later, the Defense Department hired Google's cloud division to work on Project Maven, a sweeping effort to enhance its surveillance drones with technology that helps machines think and see.

Milo Medin, a Google vice president, turned the conversation to using artificial intelligence in war games.