U.S. lawmakers this month pitched a new program to increase adoption of artificial intelligence across combatant commands, one of the latest efforts to boost a technology that officials say provides an edge over world competitors like Russia and China. A $200 million Artificial Intelligence Development Fund was included in the $1.5 trillion fiscal year 2022 government funding package, and was highlighted by House and Senate appropriation committees. Another $50 million was flagged to improve recruitment and development of AI talent at the Department of Defense. "The congressional defense committees' oversight efforts discovered numerous opportunities to accelerate the pace of change, especially with respect to security and deterrence in the Indo-Pacific region, space and cyber capabilities, artificial intelligence, and infrastructure and public shipyard improvements," budget documents state. The efforts lodged in the latest budget dovetail with the Pentagon's Artificial Intelligence and Data Acceleration initiative, announced in June 2021.

With an injection of $11 million in Series A financing, a start-up called nference is hoping to shake up the life-sciences industry through its artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Founded in 2013, the company aims to "synthesize the exponentially growing biomedical knowledge," using neural networks to glean insights from scientific literature, genomics, and real-world evidence, according to the announcement. To date, nference has raised $14 million in funding in pursuit of that goal, according to the start-up tracker Crunchbase. "Natural language is the connective fabric across all therapeutic areas and support functions of large pharmaceutical companies," Venky Soundararajan, PhD, the organization's founder and chief scientific officer, said in a statement, adding that nference's goals would change life sciences. "This presents a paradigm shift toward hypothesis-free scientific research and AI-augmented [research and development] R&D decision making."