Pentagon explores military uses of large language models

Paul Scharre, a former Defense Department official who is now executive vice president at the Center for a New American Security, said that some of the best uses probably have yet to be discovered. He said what has excited defense officials about LLMs is their flexibility to handle diverse tasks, compared with earlier AI systems. “Most AI systems have been narrow AI,” he said. “They are able to do one task right. AlphaGo was able to play Go. Facial recognition systems could recognize faces. But that’s all they can do. Whereas language seems to be this bridge toward more general-purpose abilities.”

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Scharre estimated that China’s AI models are currently 18 to 24 months behind U.S. ones. “U.S. technology sanctions are top of mind for them,” he said. “They’re very eager to find ways to reduce some of these tensions between the U.S. and China, and remove some of these restrictions on U.S. technology like chips going to China.”

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