Maynard Holliday, deputy chief technology officer for critical technologies at the Department of Defense, said DOD recognizes the “need to own the technical baseline” of artificial intelligence as AI technologies transition into military platforms, Breaking Defense reported Friday.
“We recognize we need to fast-follow, but we also need to develop military-specific applications of these commercial technologies, and as Under Secretary LaPlante has said in the past, we need to own the technical baseline of these technologies, so that we can have control over their evolution to a militarily specific solution, rather than being vendor-locked and having us beholden to one single vendor to evolve a capability,” Holliday told the publication in an interview.
When asked about how the Pentagon can create a balance between owning its technical baseline and having an industry that is obsessed with intellectual property protection, he cited the need for a “corpus of data” that is specific to the department.
“We’re going to have to develop our own militarily specific, DoD-specific corpus of data that’s updated with our information, our jargon, so that we can interact with it seamlessly — and that we trust it,” Holliday noted.
Holliday also discussed DOD’s plans to host a three-day conference on autonomy and AI in June, mentioning possible topics of discussion at the upcoming event, including Large Language Models, command systems, cybersecurity and the department’s recently updated policy on the reliability, ethics and control of autonomous weapons.
