“NATIONAL DEFENSE MAGAZINE” By Allyson Park
“The Cell will leverage an initial investment of $100 million over fiscal years 2024 and 2025 and award about $40 million in SBIR funding for generative AI solutions applying commercial applications to healthcare and financial management.”
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“On Dec. 11, the Defense Department’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office announced the establishment of the AI Rapid Capabilities Cell, tasked with helping the department accelerate the adoption and delivery of advanced AI capabilities.
While the United States is at the “cutting edge” when it comes to AI capability development, advancements made by adversaries like China, Russia, Iran and North Korea are accelerating and pose significant national security risks, Dr. Radha Plumb, chief digital and artificial intelligence officer, told reporters during a briefing at the Pentagon.
“We are taking an all hands on deck approach to ensuring the U.S. continues to lead the way and accelerate DoD adoption of these tools, and I’m confident we’re up to the challenge,” she said. “The United States’ decisive and enduring advantage lies in the innovation that’s inherent in [the] commercial sector and the department’s ability to incorporate that into our critical missions.”
Managed by the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office, the AI Rapid Capabilities Cell, or AI RCC, will be executed in partnership with the Defense Innovation Unit, which will serve as a principal liaison between the department and the national security innovation base.
The cell will also leverage and implement the recommendations and findings of Task Force Lima, which was set up by Deputy Secretary Kathleen Hicks in August 2023 to accelerate and scale the deployment of “cutting-edge AI-enabled tools across 15 use cases for generative AI,” aligned into two larger categories: warfighting functions and enterprise management functions, a Pentagon fact sheet stated.
The AI Rapid Capabilities Cell will follow a three-step process to accelerate AI capabilities. First, it will identify and test technology through rapid experimentation and prototyping. Second, it will assess the effectiveness of technology, not only based on whether or not it worked but whether or not it is effective, used by warfighters and key customers and its scalability and sustainability. Third, it will use defined acquisition pathways to scale the technology across the Defense Department.
“This rapid experimentation approach will allow us to test and identify where these cutting-edge technologies can make our forces more lethal and our processes more effective,” Plumb said. “But equally critically, the AI RCC will define the requirements for enterprise infrastructure to support scaled AI development. That includes compute, development environment and AI-ready data.”
To meet these objectives, the AI Rapid Capabilities Cell will leverage an initial investment of $100 million over fiscal years 2024 and 2025.
The AI RCC is moving forward immediately to develop four frontier AI pilots, totaling about $35 million. Two of the pilots will be focused on warfighting use cases, and the other two will be focused on enterprise management. Plumb said her office plans to work with its DIU partners to open up opportunities for additional pilots “in the near future.”
The department will also be awarding about $40 million in Small Business Innovation Research funding to fund generative AI solutions for specific department ecosystems, from “applying commercial applications to healthcare and financial management to solutions in critical warfighting areas like autonomy,” Plumb said. The department has received “hundreds of responses” to the request for solutions and will award the funds in mid-January.
Frontier AI also requires significant computing resources and a testing sandbox, Plumb said.
“To enable this environment, we’re implementing a multiple cloud approach to resourcing in line with our Open DAGIR construct and the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability,” she said. “We will onboard two cloud service providers in mid-January, which will have those sandboxes, and we’ll fast follow with the two remaining cloud services providers by next summer.”
To ensure the reliability of new generative AI technology, the AI Rapid Capabilities Cell is issuing a generative AI version of CDAO’s responsible AI toolkit, which will help users make sure they incorporate “the best practices and streamline the policies to allow more rapid adoption of AI and management of it through its entire product life cycle,” Plumb said.
While the AI Rapid Capabilities Cell will implement the recommendations of Task Force Lima, it will not focus on a specific mission set, Plumb said.
“I think the top priority is identifying the highest return on investment areas where cutting-edge AI, generative AI in particular, can rapidly improve either lethality or efficiency, depending on whether it’s warfighting or business management,” she said. “We see a range of different workflows from the Task Force Lima work that that can happen. This is about identifying those pilots, proving out the case and then making sure we have the pathway to scale those quickly.”
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