PrairiePundit

  National Review: President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced a joint venture between three large tech companies to invest as much as $500 billion into building out U.S. artificial intelligence infrastructure. The joint venture, known as Stargate, involves Oracle, Open AI, and Softbank and will see the companies join together to build out American data centers to power artificial intelligence systems, including ChatGPT. Stargate, which could cost up to $500 billion over a four-year period, will begin with a data center in Texas, a state friendly to crypto and other parts of the tech industry. “This monumental undertaking is a resounding declaration of confidence in America’s potential under a new president,” Trump said. He appeared relaxed and made several off-the-cuff quips during the press conference. Trump said he would help the venture speed up production through emergency declarations and predicted that it would create 100,000 American jobs. CBS News first reported on the an...

 Business Insider: As artificial intelligence becomes more capable and more widely used, militaries are trying to harness it to increase their effectiveness. Recent exercises and announcements show how the US and its allies are turning to AI for help with some of the most complex naval operations in their playbook. Over five days in October, the British military and industry partners conducted amphibious landings using some 130 personnel, 13 vessels, crewed and uncrewed aircraft, and 50 cameras and sensors to record their activity and gather data for AI products. Conducted in challenging conditions, including wind up to 40 knots, the drills "saw personnel boarding and leaving vehicles in different ways to generate data representative of different behavioural traits," the British Ministry of Defence said in a release . "Data captured during the exercise included visual, infrared, sonar and radar as well as supporting 'metadata' including platform and sensor locati...

 Business Insider: The US defense complex is looking to harness the power of artificial intelligence, Bloomberg reported , citing one Air Force colonel who said the technology can speed up tasks rapidly. Matthew Strohmeyer, the colonel, said a large language model, or LLM, zipped through a task in 10 minutes that usually would have taken humans hours or days to complete. "It was highly successful," he told Bloomberg. "It was very fast." The story said the Pentagon wouldn't say which LLMs it's testing, but it did say the models are being fed some "secret-level" data to see how they function in real-time. The Defense Department could eventually use AI to help make decisions. The current eight-week exercise runs until July 26, Bloomberg reported. Representatives for the Department of Defense did not immediately respond to Insider's emailed request for comment ahead of publication. ... I suspect we will see AI used in other areas of complexity.  It...

 Telegraph: The US Air Force is gambling big on artificial intelligence (AI). The world’s leading air arm plans to acquire a thousand AI-controlled armed drones in the coming years. It’s betting that these “loyal wingman” drones will be nimbler and cheaper than traditional manned fighter jets. It’s a solid wager. A recent experiment proves why. In early 2019, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) – the Pentagon’s fringe-science agency – recruited eight teams of coders to develop the first-ever dogfighting AI under the auspices of the AlphaDogfight project. The competitors included major American defense firms such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing, smaller companies including Maryland-based Heron Systems and upstart squads from universities such as Georgia Tech. In mid-2020, Darpa hosted a series of dogfighting competitions pitting the AIs against each other. And a few months after that, it deployed the most competitive AI – Heron’s – against an actual human: a US A...

 Fox News: Israel is working to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into its battlefield operations as it looks to lead the way on handling "the biggest game changer" for technology. "The future of defense systems and of military will rely heavily on artificial intelligence," former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett told Fox News Digital in an exclusive interview. "I'm talking about the analysis of massive data in intelligence," he explained. "I'm talking about operating drones and other types of automatic and autonomous robots. Any country who seeks to be strong has to develop now an AI strategy," which he said he did during his tenure as prime minister. The Israel Defense Forces announced in February that the force has started utilizing AI in its operations, saying new digital methods helped produce "200 new target assets" during a 10-day operation in 2021 to successfully target at least two Hamas commanders, The Je...

 Fox News: Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has been waging a battle for the last several months over what he called "woke" artificial intelligence, a fight that appears to have factored into his call for a six-month pause in the development of next generation AI systems. Musk was one of several signatories to a letter this week that warned of advanced AI technology that could pose "profound risks to society and humanity." The letter said one of those risks is that AI might be used to "flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth." The letter was signed by several notable technology experts, and it’s not clear who might have pushed for the inclusion of that specific phrase. But it jibes with the public fight Musk has been having since late last year over the ability of AI to constrain what people can say and read on digital platforms – a fight that involves a company Musk had a role in launching. In 2015, Musk co-founded OpenAI, the company t...