WHERE INNOVATION COMES FROM:

Last year, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency kicked off the AI Next campaign, a $2 billion effort to build artificial intelligence tools capable of human-like communication and logical reasoning that far surpass the abilities of today's most advanced tech. Included in the agency's portfolio are efforts to automate the scientific process, create computers with common sense, study the tech implications of insect brains and link military systems to the human body.

Through the AI Exploration program, the agency is also supplying rapid bursts of funding for a myriad of high-risk, high-reward efforts to develop new AI applications.

Defense One's sister publication Nextgov sat down with Valerie Browning, director of DARPA's Defense Sciences Office, to discuss the government's AI research efforts, the shortcomings of today's tech and the growing tension between the tech industry and the Pentagon. [...]

Nextgov: Looking at the AI Exploration program, what are the benefits to doing that kind of quick, short-term funding?

Browning: We have limited resources, and sometimes we find an area that we think may be ripe for investment but there's some key questions that need to be answered. We really don't want to scale up a very large [program], but we want to get some answers pretty quickly. The very act of trying to bring in a new performer through the sort of conventional acquisition cycle can be very long and tedious. [For this program], the time from posting a topic announcement to actually getting people doing work is 90 days or less, and that's fairly unprecedented in government contracting. AI Exploration allows us to go after some of the more high-risk, uncertain spaces quickly to find out whether they're on the critical path toward reaching our ultimate vision.

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