Nand Mulchandani, acting director of the Defense Department’s Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, takes questions from reporters at the Pentagon about the Department of Defense’s artificial intelligence initiatives, July 8, 2020.
Transcript
Afternoon, everybody. So good afternoon or good morning or good afternoon, Ladies and gentlemen, welcome today’s press briefing today, the acting director of the D O D Joint Artificial Intelligence Center, Mr Non Molten Dani will provide an update an overview of ongoing AI initiatives in the Department of Defense. After the opening remarks will go out to the room and to the phones. I’ll ask that each person either raise their hand. If you were in the room and I’ve got a list of people that have called in on, I’ll go out to the phones will alternate, and it’ll provide an opportunity for everybody to ask the question, Uh, with respect to time, we asked each personally asked one question and follow up. And then if we get to, everybody will go back around. If there’s additional questions. A standard. Just identify yourself with your name and your organization before asking your question. And with that, I will now turn it over to our director, Mr Multan. Donny for his opening remarks. Great. Thank you are low. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. It’s so great to have everyone here and on the phones today. I’m both personally excited and humbled to be addressing all of you in my first breast press briefing here at the Pentagon. After a long career in the technology industry, my pivot to public services, The View D has been both educational on how the department works and exciting and how much changes happening in adopting new technologies and practices. Last month, I took over the leadership of the Jake from General Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan, who left behind an amazing track record both as a career Air Force officer but also the founder of AI at the D. O D. Having led Project Maven and then the Jake general. Shanahan was a great mentor and a friend to me in helping to learn about operating in the department, and we worked together on fusing the best ideas from the American technology industry and customizing them to work at the D. O. D. He’s missed by all of us and leaves behind this transformation that were driving. Right now, I’m personally grateful for the time that I got to work with him. Now let’s turn to a discussion of the state of the Jake, laid out as a story of a classic startup that is operational izing new technology with an innovative business model. As someone who has co founded and led multiple startup companies and has been involved in the venture capital industry for many years, I know that starting a new organization to product ties new technology is always a challenge. And that’s doubly true for a new technology start up inside the D. O D. And I know this is obvious everyone. But in spite of the fact that a. I is an emerging area of tack, it is still technology and not magic. The initial challenge that we’re working one right now is adopting it for use in your existing capabilities with other horizons of challenges. Beyond that, having been through these types of major technology shifts, I’m a big believer in the classic hockey stick curve. It takes time and investment to get going, but technology, maturity and adoption typically hits an accelerating curve once it’s ready for scaling. The modulation of additional investment in adjusting this curve is a core part of how you manage tech transitions like this. So matching this adoption of his new technology without getting ahead of this curve is where the game gets won or lost. So when the Jake was stood up in 2018 the focus was on picking low technology risk areas but solid payoff projects in areas such as disaster relief and predictive maintenance. These products are now maturing, and we’re working closely with the services and combatant commands to transition these products into production and delivering value, such as the 8 60 helicopter engine health model that’s now in production at SOCOM and other announcements that will be making in the future. As an organization. We have learned a great deal from our successes and setbacks in managing these mission initiatives. And those lessons are reflected in our refined business model and plan that we call Jake 2.0, we’re now in an even stronger position to operationalize those lessons, learned Dr Scale and catalyze long term change in the deal D through A. I just to remind everyone that the Jake itself is not just a technology and product organization. Our missions team engaged deeply with our customers who are the services and command commands are acquisition strategy and policy, human re sources and education and training initiatives enable the Jake to fulfill its mandate as the D O D Centre for Excellence for A I. We view the mission to transform the deal the through I as a whole team effort. And more broadly, the Jake now leads the D o D wide AI governance process, which involves participation for most the senior leaders across the command commands and D o D components in the services that allows us to synchronize efforts and share learnings across the D. O D justice with traditional software. AI software is relevant to the full spectrum of D. O D activities, from the back office to the front lines of the battle field. The JAKE has six mission initiatives under way that are all too making exciting progress. Joint warfighting operations, warfighter, health, business process, transformation, threat reduction and protection, which is what used to be called H. A. D. R and joint logistics, which covers are predictive maintenance efforts and our newest one, which is called Joint Information Warfare, which also covers cyber operations. As we have matured, we’re now devoting special focus on our Joint Warfighting Operations Mission and Mission Initiative, which is focused on the priorities of the national defense strategy and its goal of preserving America’s military and technological advantages over our strategic competitors. In late May of this year, the Jake awarded the Joint Warfighting Operations Prime contract with an $807,000,000 ceiling to Booz Allen Hamilton. The list of companies supporting the Jake and the Joint Warfighting operations AM I now includes not only many of America’s largest and most recognizable technology companies, but also a host of innovative, smaller defense technology startups as well in partnership with the American industry and organizations across the D. O. D. The capabilities that the JAKE is developing as part of the Joint Warfighting Operations Missions Initiative will use mature AI technology to create decisive advantage for the American war fighter. As just one example, we’re developing in collaboration with the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab, an Army POC three, the fire support cognitive assistant that will help commanders triage incoming communications and support joint all domain command and control, which is also called jazzy, too for F Y 20 and F Y 20. Spending on joint warfighting is roughly greater than the combined spending on all of the other Jakes mission initiatives. Just to underscore the importance of this new initiative for us now. Having emphasized our strategic focus, let me emphasize speed and customer focus. I know some of you here are already familiar with Project SALIS, which is an AI enabled Predictive Analytics platform that was developed by our team and is currently enabling the common operational picture of the cop interface at the U. S. Northern Command headquarters in Colorado. And it helping their operational planners with supply chain management in support of the Federal Cove in 19 response by betting a team of customer engagement, uh, professionals directly with them. This product went from concept to code. So there’s a basic idea of how quickly we can get from an idea toe actually production or in operations or code deployed is. Actually, it’s in a few weeks, we plan to use this development model across the other products that we’re building in an effort towards scaling our products. So I hope this has been a good overview where things are with the Jake now. For the last part of this discussion, I wanted to take this opportunity to directly address a few issues that always come up around any discussion of our organization. As we all know any significant advances that we’re gonna make a new technology areas will be in partnership with our industry and academic partners. I know that in the past, some of you have written about the challenges the Department of Defense has had working with the American tech industry, such as with Project Maven, and there are no question there have and always will be specific incidents that make the news. However, it turns out that we have had overwhelming support and interest from tech industry and working with the Jake and the D. O. D. And have commercial contracts and work going on with all of the major tech and AI companies, including Google and many others on projects that have a major impact on U. S national security. They’re free to engage with us on projects across the spectrum from bending the cost curve to combat systems. But in all cases, the engagements and relationships of incredibly valuable and our bonds are only getting stronger. The other issue that I’d like to address is the concept of AI superiority and whether our peer competitors are somehow ahead of us in a I. While it is true that the United States faces formidable technological competitors and challenging strategic environment. The reality is that the United States continues Elite and AI and its most important military applications. First, the concept of a I as a single monolithic technology does not exist when talking about technology and products. It is best to do that on a case by case basis, up technology and a vertical focus basis like what other parts of business. Anything that has value gets investment. Let’s remember that this current wave of AI was driven by online shopping and advertising through clicking now analytics. So the key point to be made here is that leadership in military AI is inherently application specific in contact. Specific. There are some areas where China’s military and police authorities undeniably have the world’s most advanced capabilities, such as unregulated facial recognition for universal surveillance and control of their domestic population. Trained on Chinese video gathered from their systems and Chinese language text analysis for Internet and media censorship, it is not that the United States military is technologically incapable of developing such systems. It is that our Constitution and privacy laws protect the rights of U. S citizens, and it’s how their data is collected and used, and therefore we simply don’t invest in building such universal surveillance and censorship systems. Further, we know that China and Russia are developing exporting AI enabled surveillance technologies and autonomous combat systems without providing any evidence of adequate technical or ethical safeguards and policies. By contrast, the United States has openly published its policies on both military autonomy and ethics. So put simply, the United States is not behind in a race for these applications. We simply deny that their development in use for the ends of state repression and control represents forward progress. However, for the specific national security applications where we believe that will make a significant impact in the future balance of military power and strategic competition, I believe the United States not only leading the world, but it’s taking many of the steps needed to preserve US military advantage over the long term, as evidence by what we just discussed what we’re doing here at the Jake. In stark contrast to our strategic competitors, we have done this while preserving and doubly down on our very public commitment to developing safe and ethical responsible, a technology and our commitment to cooperating with our allies and partners. During my recent trip to NATO and the EU in January, it was very apparent that we share much in common with our European partners on our commitment to military ethics and the benefits of AI to modernize our military forces and strengthen our alliances and partnerships for the digital age. So through all of this, just like any other great startup organization will maintain a sense of urgency and all we dio we understand the stakes are high, the competition is busy and that we can’t afford to slow down. So I wanted to thank all of our leadership in the department, including secretary, defense, deputy secretary, services secretary’s the chairman, vice chairman, Joint chiefs of staff, my boss dotc Io Dana DZ to our leadership in Congress, partners in industry and academia, allies and militaries across the world and, of course, the American people, for your confidence and support of the Jake to deliver in our mandate to transform the deal t through a I. We have a lot of work in front of us, but I’m absolutely confident about the direction we’re heading in and the impact will have on our military over the next couple years. Was that happy to take your questions? Thank you. Thank you, sir, for those remarks, and I’m gonna go out to, ah, journalists in the room first, and then we’ll go to the phones. And, ma’am, if you could lead us off if you have a question. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. Sandra Irwin, With space news high, I wanted to ask you about your connections with the intelligence community as far as their investments that they’re making an AI for analytics, which is significant investment for geospatial intelligence and other tools that they need for military commanders. How are you leveraging that? How are you interacting with that side of the national security community? Thank you. Yeah. Great. Great question. Thank you. Um, as you noted, there’s huge investments going on on that side of the of the D. O. D. And other agencies as well. Right now, a lot of the work going on in a I is fundamental building block ai, if you may. So if you look at other products going on in the intel side or even the work we’re doing, we’re working on fundamental ai algorithms. Data collection, etcetera, that builds basically algorithms for things like vision and full motion video, etcetera. We do share a lot of common building blocks and models with them. However, we do keep a strict, you know, separation in terms of data, which obviously is the life blood of AI in terms of all of the legal limits and policies and other things in terms of sharing information that make spillover in terms of citizens, data or other things there. But from a fundamental building blocks perspective, we actually have a lot of work going on between other projects like, for instance, maven on and others, but also the broader intelligence community. Just a quick follow up. How do you work with the private sector? Do you Do they pitch ideas to you? Do they tell you what’s going on? What sort of your interaction? Uh, actually extensive interaction? Um, first, as we have our industry relations individual who runs industry relations for Jake is actually located out in Mountain View, California not in Washington, D. C. So we’re right at the heart of Silicon Valley co located with Dru, with whom we work very closely. Second, we all of our solicitations in terms of our our peas or other work that we do are all post publicly. We tend to get dozens and dozens or large amounts of inbound interest, both through our fees but also on a regular basis. I have an entire we have an entire data and AI team that actually spends time evaluating new products, looking at the frontier of what’s coming down the pipe, both in academic research but also an industry research. The other thing I’d say is the Jake is you know, we are located under the sea. Io focused on commercializing a technology that is scaled out there. There’s an other entire part of the d. O d. Obviously DARPA RNE that actually does other types of engineering and fundamental research on a I. And one of the things that we’re doing is actually working very closely with them on product izing and taking mature technologies as their maturing and bringing them into production. And so the Jake actually is part of a much larger system that we have at the D. O. D. That is going all the way from fundamental research all the way to delivery and deployment. And the Jake is sort of a key part of it, but were part of a much larger machine that deals with industry deals. Attack on all the other pieces. I’m not gonna go out to the phones. The first question will come from Gulf Oil. Ratnam from Congressional Quarterly. Gopal, Go ahead. Can you hear me? Yes. Thanks for doing this. Call none you mentioned in the context of AI and China how that country facial recognition program, for example, is completely unregulated. So I want to ask a question on that front. In the context of the current civil rights protests all across the country, lots of companies that are in the business of King facial recognition software and technology Amazon, Microsoft and others have said that they would either suspend or completely halt You know, any further development and investment in those technologies, especially for police use. Now, is there any How do you think about using facial recognition all related technologies in military applications? So, um, couple of things Teoh to say on that number one is private companies are obviously absolutely open, and it this is free country. They can build any products, sell any products they like. Local and state governments. Other parts of the U. S. Government are free to adopt any technologies that are within the law or within their policies or local sort of other pieces there. As faras the D. O. D goes, though we are strictly regulated in terms of, uh, not only dealing with US citizens data, but personal data doing any work inside the United States. So from that standpoint, we the D. O. D the Jake actually do not invest or work in any of that type of technology, especially when it comes to handling any form of data when it comes to US citizens or other things. So I can’t comment on what other organizations may be doing outside the d. O d. But when it comes to the d. O. D itself, we are strictly regulated by those policies and loss. And as a matter of fact, Aiken actually clearly tell you that at the Jake we actually do not have work going on on any form of facial recognition technology today. Great. I fracking. That has one more question on a different topic. Your reference the project sailors work on. You said how that has been transition and it’s now being used across the country. Can you give any offer any concrete example of how that particular technology is being deployed? I think this is created in the context of dealing with shortages driven by the covert pandemic. Example. Eso This product was developed in direct work with North com and, uh, in the National Guard. Uh, the have obviously a very unique role to play in ensuring that resource shortages, whether it be water, medicine, supplies, etcetera are harmonised across an area that’s dealing with the disaster. What they did not have before is predictive analytics on where the shortages will occur, a swell as real time analytics in terms of supply and demand. So we have now roughly about 40 to 50 different data streams coming into projects. Alice if the data platform layer and then we have another 40 to 45 different AI models that are all running on top of the platform that allow for General Sean see the North com operations team, all of them to actually get real time information but also actually get predictive analytics on where shortages and things will occur. So, for instance, based on a particular weather event hitting, for instance, the system is able to predict where traffic bottlenecks will happen. Hotel vacancies may. May may happen where military bases are that could actually stockpile in, you know, food and other things. There a swell as retail information flow through retail information. So there’s a tremendous amount of data that we’ve aggregated again, all fully vetted by our lawyers by OSD Policy and others to make sure that there’s no personally identifiable data. It’s down to the ZIP code level, but this is a product that North com We worked incredibly closely, co located with them and ah, and built this product in record speed. Really exciting product for the Jake and I like to go. Sir, you can go ahead and take questions. Is that Zach based Center for Public Integrity? I want to ask about the debate principles? Eso General Shanahan, when they were approved by the secretary, noted that the principles themselves are fairly vague and that it was really gonna come down to implementation and the actions taken to ensure those principles are part of the process for acquiring and developing a what had what’s being done now. How far along are we in implementing those principles? Andi, how has it worked? Getting them to be part of the process. Great question of principles right here on. Think about them all the time. We have an entire team A to Jake focused on on nothing but policy. A policy air ethics. Uh, Al Capitale of sees are lead eths leads that Sandman Kim who’s on the policy side? Mark Biel, who’s our chief of strategy and policy runs that eso exactly. The point that you’ve made is how do we take these lofty bigger goals and actually, production allies them. Ah, and that’s where the Jake comes in. So we have a multi pronged approach that we’re working on number one. We have deep engagement with industry and other teams that have actually already created their own ethics principles, whether they before advertising for bias, for other things. And we’re now actually going out and picking and choosing the best parts of how they’ve implemented it, how they’ve taken those goals and actually put them in code. A za former obviously computer engineer but an entrepreneur in the tech industry, I’ve done my whole career in terms of taking sort of translated English into actual code and deployment. What we’re doing also is our policy team has a seat at the table with our product development teams. So, for instance, the joint warfighting R P that I just mentioned that Booz Allen Hamilton one If you go back and read it It is the first RFP that the D. O. D has ever delivered where we actually embedded some of the ethical principles into the actual R P not as a requirement, but as mawr informational for a staff. She understand how vendors will start answering these questions because we do understand that as the d. O. D standardizes hopefully on these types of principles, as we put them into our API’s, this becomes a structure that industry has to respond to. So we have an iterative process where we’re actually learning how this will work. So we actually don’t overregulate or or do something that actually cuts off sort of good commerce there. Of the third is, there’s an AI governance process that I mentioned across the D. O. D. There’s an entire track focused on ethical principles and other pieces there, and then last but not least, we have an international engagement strategy where Mark and Mark’s team, led by Stephanie Culberson, actually has direct contact with other countries are partners, allies, etcetera, all of working on harmonizing these thes principles here. So, uh, I could go into probably an hour long, more of work that we’re doing. But we take this work very seriously. We have an entire team on it, and this to us, is an incredibly important Jake product. So other than all the products tech products we’ve talked about, these principles are actually going to be actually one of the most important products that the Jake delivers basket phone, which is one of the initiatives. There’s a joint warfighting initiative that General Shanahan described is potentially the first lethal AI application that would be out in about 2021 is when they would start to be testing on it. As he described it. Um, so I got first off, you know, is that still the plan? Because he he described it. There is me testing on the first lethal AI implementation 2021 the second component, which is why I wanted raises. How have those principles impacted? What could be the first lethal. I see. So let me Let me. Actually, this is a very interesting question are asking, but let me parse that out a little bit. I don’t want to start string into issues around autonomy and lethality versus Lethal Arliss ality itself. So, yes, it is true that many of the products we work will go into weapons systems. None of them right now are going to be autonomous. Weapons systems were still governed by 3000 auto nine. That principle still stays intact. None of the work or anything that General Shanahan may have mentioned crosses that line, period. Now we do have projects going on under joint warfighting, which are going to be actually going into testing their very tactical edge. Ai as the way I describe it and that work is going to be tested. It’s actually very promising work. We’re very excited about it. It’s It’s one of the as I talked about the pivot from critical maintenance and others to join warfighting, that is the probably the flagship product that were sort of thinking about and talking about that Will will go out there, but it will involve you know it. Operators human in the loop. Full human control. All of those things are still absolutely valid. Go out to the phones now. I’d like to go to Mr Travis Triton from Bloomberg News. Okay. Um, can you hear me? OK, Yeah. Thank you. Fantastic. Thanks for doing this. You know, Congress is putting together the annual optimization and spending bills. I would like to ask you again about your joint warfighting portfolio. You touched on this a couple of times. I’m just wondering it if you could talk a little bit more over whether you’ll be expanding that work in fiscal year 21. And what are your priorities specifically, you know, battlefield capabilities and projects you’ll be pursuing. It seemed like you kind of just touched on that. Can you be a little bit more specific about what you’re planning for? Apply 21? Sure, Sure. Um, here’s how we’re tackling the problem. Um, obviously, the Jake is a small organization inside a very large d o. D. So changing or transforming it is going to take time and other things there. So what we’re doing is focusing on key projects going on across the military that are that are the largest sort of change agents. One of them, which all of you I’m did mention is called Jack C two. So join all domain command and control systems. Now, Jack C. Two is not a single product. It is a collection of platforms that get stitched together, and we woven together into effectively a platform. And the Jake is spending a lot of time. And resource is focused on building the AI components on top of jazzy, too. So if you can imagine a command and control system that is current and the way it’s configured today, uh, our job and role is to actually build out the AI components both from a data modelling and then training perspective and then deploying those. So that’s gonna be a big focus on it. And then there’s, Ah, whole area around cognitive assistance that I talked about. For instance, the way we see AI evolving over time is it’s going from things like numerical data that you see in things like predictive maintenance, etcetera. We’ve got obviously health care which directly addresses operational readiness on. Then you move to join warfighting, where we believe that the current crop of AI systems today because they’re not gonna go into fully automated, you know, mode are going to be cognitive assistance very similar to project Sallis in terms of predictive analytics or picking out particular things of interest. And those types of information overload cleanup are the types of products that were actually be investing in. And then we moved to more autonomy over time. But that’s purely a progression in terms of time and am maturity that will take up. So we’re riding the maturity curve like I talked about, but cognitive assistance, jazzy to command and control these air all pieces there and all the technical components. Like I talked about Tactical edge AI working and denied or, you know ah, you know, jammed environments. These are all the realities that we’re looking through in the future, in terms of what systems need to deploy in very low communication band with environments, degraded environments, denied environments, etcetera. Those are all things that we’re actually spending a lot of time focus on as part of the joint war fighting. Okay, I’ll go back to the O Far far is your ah, joint warfighting budget. Could you talk about how you want to expand that versus F Y 20 death like 21. What type of an expansion are we looking at? Thank you. It’s a little early because the model I I don’t know if any of you been following kind of how we also select products. Very different model of we think of this is a enterprise sales or a venture capital model. So think of a giant funnel of ideas that you create that are all competing with each other for money. And if you think about building a healthy pipeline, you want the healthiest pipeline you possibly can, so you can actually funnel them down to a set of products are actually going to to invest in. We have a very healthy pipeline that’s actually getting even bigger. Ah, and that process of whittling down the funnel into the projects that we focus on from a portfolio perspective in 21 is happening right now we’ve just closed out after 20. The joint warfighting contract that you saw has an $806 million ceiling, which means up to we clearly aren’t going to be spending all that money because the entire Jakes budget for a couple of years is actually 800 some $1,000,000. So, um, I’ll just leave it at that, That there’s a lot of room there. But the fact is, is that the actual products and what we select and what we announce will be doing that over time, I’m gonna go back to the room. Sure. You could go ahead and build your question. Yes, please think. OK, A moment ago, you talked a little bit about information. Warfare is something that you were looking at, and I know that they’re gonna be limited in terms of details. But can you talk a little bit about how you see AI changing the delivery of cyber effects and also the defense against AI Cyber? Fix a great question and I’ll break it out into both what you would consider to be traditional cybersecurity. And then there’s information security, which are probably two parallel but but but similar sort of pieces there. And both have obviously offensive and defensive mode. So there’s kind of four quadrants to really talk about, um, on the defense of side uh, ai, I’ve had ah, 20 plus year career in security products, and what you find is a I has actually been used for a very, very long time in analysis of vent analysis or malware analysis or attack analysis, etcetera. So that’s a well trodden path. They’re actually very mature products in that space, etcetera. But that’s really for defending the D. O D networks and other tactical networks on the offensive side. Actually, I think there’s huge potential for using a I in offensive capabilities. Obviously, cyber com is going to be the focus there. The combatant commands that we focus on and work with. I can’t specifically talk about any areas of technology it themselves. But I can sort of point to things like vulnerability, assessments and vulnerability discovery. There’s a huge amount of work there in terms of finding attack, surface and, you know, weaknesses and networks and things, anomaly detection or actually being able to map networks and things. So there are. There’s a huge goldmine of work there that actually is. Industry has just barely started in terms of attacking got. Now when you talk of cybersecurity, one of the issues is there sort of offensive defense on the offense. On the defense side, you deal with the issue of false positives, So in A I technology is just in general. Is all of you know you’re dealing with probabilities there No certainties Based on the training data on the record, the records that you you take of the network traffic, etcetera, for instance, the trainer models. You may end up with things like false positives, which then either generate network outages if you put it in denial mode or you have to actually go scrub those events. So there is that aspect. But in the case of offense, you’re actually a lot. It’s a lot better and easier. Ah, and information warfare. Just cover one piece on two pieces there. When it comes to the analysis side, there is a huge amount of work, as you know, going on both in NLP in being able to dio, you know, text recognition across multiple languages, etcetera. That work is actually gets getting skilled in industry. We have multiple companies that are out there that could do this. NLP and speech to text is actually a fairly mature AI technology that could be deployed in production and that actually is going to be used in reducing information overload. So being able to scan vast quantities of open source information and bring the sort of nuggets and important stuff on the O piece. And then when it comes to offensive operations, I can obviously talk about that. But, um, you can read the news in terms of what I think our adversaries are doing out there, and you can imagine that there’s, ah, a lot of room for growth in that area. Quick question on a slightly different topic from And so the Jake sits at the center of a nexus between the Defense Department in Silicon Valley and you have a lot of Silicon Valley experience, Um, every tech CEO I’ve ever spoken to. They’ve all emphasized the extreme importance of H one B visas to what they do to the American technology innovation model. So in your conversations with different partners that are enthusiastically embracing what the Jake is doing, when do they think that they a suspension and h one B visas might begin to impact their ability to create the things that we need them to create what might be the larger effect of a suspension and h one B visas on what you do? I’ve got to say I in this year that I’ve been at the D. O D. I really haven’t. That hasn’t been a real topic of discussion directly with any of the companies or CEOs. Those air really internal matters. What what we focus on is, where is the AI talent? What’s clear is that private industry, the larger companies, etcetera. There was a CEO talked about. We often talk about inside the Jake is what we call the war for talent. There is a huge war, global war for talent on a I. There’s no question about it. You graduate right now with a degree in statistics or physics or her AI in computer science or whatever the salaries, the the bonuses, the stock options air incredible, because there’s just a lot of money chasing these problems. We have to dont agree that we’re not gonna win this war for talent, so to say, by just over paying or other things, they’re some of us air here for a variety of reasons. But the fact is that we can leverage that. So inasmuch as any of these policies impact the talent that these companies American companies can can hold on to ah, the better it is for I think the d o d. And I think for the country. Okay, I’m gonna go out to the phones. I’d like to go out to Lauryn Williams from S F C W. If she’s on the line, go ahead. Yes, Uh, thank you for doing this. I want to follow up on on that question of tally. Does Jake have enough of the stem talent to fulfill its missions? And also, what is the j doing to kind of read that sort of ai training and develop talent within the D. O d? That’s a great question. Well, I will flat out say we’ll never have enough talent. We can just double triple quadruple. The number of people we have on stem talent have never had enough have enough. But we’ve from when General Shanahan and the team started the Jake to. Now we’ve made incredible progress on that front. So our product team is organized into sort of four key pieces. Just to sort tell you how we’re organized. Were organized, actually, very much like a software company that we would start in the valley. Together we have a core team that focuses on product and project management. So we actually have real product managers who own products and deliver them out to market. So it’s really about taking the customer needs and requirements, getting the products on contract, managing them through in transitioning. We have a, uh, data science and AI team, uh, led by, uh, Marcus Commenter and Nate Baskin, who’s a major. Both of them have done a great job of building out that team Markets has graduated from a top PhD from Harvard. Came over to the Jake. I got to know when I was there and he’s been incredible, you know, resource. But also ah, win for the Jake, just in terms of the quality of applicants and people that were getting toe come work at the Jake book outside civilians but also internally. Nate actually just recently set up this thing called brain Camp that we’re actually replicating across the d. O. D. It was an all day training session on a I all the way from the fundamental basics to, um, algorithm development. Other pieces there, we haven’t a I suppose, him coming up, which actually will have some technical tracks and things there. There’s an entire AI training and education policy work that mark and team own. Um, so, uh, you know. Oh, and then our testing evil team led by Dr Jane Penelas. She has assembled an incredible team. She’s one of the world’s leading experts in a I testing on. She’s helping set the standards across the d o d for testing an evil, which is obviously an incredibly important part of deploying and fielding a I. So when it comes to quality of employees and people who understand the no tech, um, we obviously don’t rival some of the larger tech companies. But the core nucleus and leverage that we get out of the people that we have has is incredible. Okay, Go back to the room. Here, sir, we Do you have a question? Do you like to ask? Ok, eso I’ll go back out to the phones this time. I’ll go out to Mr Sydney Freeburg from breaking defense. Hi, Sydney. Hello. All right, Sidney. Free for breaking defense. Thank you, Mr Milton. Johnny, let me ask you on the one hand way have things like google and so forth. People quitting over working with may then or wanting their come to sign declarations On the other hand, we have a d o D that applies words like legality to things that that gets placed on anything. Sometimes it’s not the things that sounds scary, but perhaps are not the killer robot people imagine you, of course, will put in both worlds. How do you explain me? Take the cognitive fire support, for example, how you take something like that and explain two people in the valley who might have ethical concerns and lack much experience with the armed forces? No, that is not the Terminator. What does that actually do? And why did they be comfortable working on it? Yeah, um, you know, I the only thing I can say to that Sydney, is all of these systems are running on software and hardware systems today. What we’re doing with a I is either making them more efficient, making them faster from a decision cycle time, making the more accurate in many cases, reducing overload in terms of cost operational overhead. So there’s nothing magic that we’re really doing here other than applying AI to already existing processes or systems. When I got here from Silicon Valley a year ago, I didn’t know what? Ah, Capital Waas. And now I do. I hope you won’t make me actually tell you what the acronym stands for, but it’s it’s how targeting is the time eso these are. These are great examples where you take existing processes. There’s nothing magic about them. They have a workflow. They have a well defined criteria that people go through. What’s really interesting about the military that I found is the amount of training and processes that are put in place to make many of these things happen, and they lend themselves incredibly well from a training per se. You have to train soldiers actually follow these processes. Well, you can automate them actually very easily because they’re so well defined. And so there’s nothing really magic here on that side. Now the word lethality. And I think this is where the killer robots and Terminator stuff comes. In. The edge case that everyone is that focuses on is the such an outer edge case, and we are nowhere near from a platforms technology capability, hardware software, algorithms, perspective to get anywhere closer near to that. But that obviously, is where everybody jumps to, so the you know, the cognitive assistant for helping that. There’s still a human sitting in front of a screen who is actually being assisted by an AI algorithm. So again, it’s always human in the loop. It’s making it faster, making more accurate. Nothing more than that. Okay, so I’m gonna try to get to one or two more questions before we wrap up today. Uh, the next question, I’d like to go out to Jasmine from national defense if she’s on the line. Mom. Oh, thank you. Um, hi. Thank you so much going on. My question is about the budget. So it seems that officials are pretty resigned, you know, having a lot budget or having a declining budget. How is Jake? You know, how do you see the budget going for the Jake in the future? Um, you get all vulnerable to be cut. How can you make the case that you guys, you know, continue funding and he leveled up. Thank you. Yeah. Great question. Obviously impossible to foresee the future. Uh, we are super grateful for Congress is you know, the budget that they give us over the fight up. So we have visibility over what the budget would look like the way we operate is like I talked about us. We have a funnel the funnel. Can elastic Lee help us expand or contract the number of products that we do? It can basically move around basically based on the amount of budget or other things that’s available to us so we effectively can can plan or deal with whatever scenario actually comes up. Our expectation and hope is, you know, if you look at the top one or two or three priorities for the Department of Defense, just is the secretary defense and other officials a d o d. Talk about AI is literally in one of the top initiatives that we have to focus on. So even in a case of declining or smaller cutting cut budgets, we believe that the powers that be both Congress as well as the D. O. D banishment will focus on funding the right priorities that are important to them. And I believe a I will hopefully be one of them and, you know, we’ll see. But when it comes to planning, you know, I’m the veteran of multiple startups. Money comes, money goes, you have to really just get the job done with whatever funding you have, so we don’t sweat a lot about it because it’s an unknown. It’s something that we can’t control. And, you know, we obviously want the budgets to expand because we’ve got great projects to deliver on. But in the grand scheme of things, we’ll see where things end up and we’ll do what’s necessary. Okay, we’ll go back out to the phones this time to Justin Doubleday from inside Defense over to you. Justin. Hey, thanks for doing this. I just wanted to ask Go back to the joint war fighting project. Just ask. You know, Project May then to go back to that is a comparative example. I got things done pretty quickly. Got some products out of the field, I think, in six months, but they were building off of established. Someone established feels object. Recognition has already for the joint warfighting projects and things like the the fire support cognitive assistant. Is this building off from existing technologies? And how quickly are you looking to get things out in the field? Are there things already? Yes. Oh, that’s a great question, actually. So, with the cognitive fires assistant, the core technology, there’s NLP. So when you think of how targeting actually gets done and, uh, you know assistance to it you have multiple chat windows, lots of information coming in. You know, somebody, uh you know, the product manager runs that when you actually look and go see what actually happens on the screen, there’s literally 10 to 15 different chat windows, all moving, sort of at the same time. So we’re applying NLP technology to a lot of that information and being able to condense it down and then raise the importance level and actually structure the information over time off of that. So that’s using an LP in the case of ST Maven, So ah, you know, the core building blocks around object recognition and video. I wouldn’t say that that was a scaled technology just yet. That’s one of the hardest problems to solve out in, um, in a I right now is being able to get that level of detail. There is the level of complication in terms of sensor technology, angles, sunlight, uh, etcetera. You will not imagine the complexity and doing this thing correctly and write s Oh, yes, they did a brilliant thing in terms of fielding functionality quickly and then continuously iterating. Over the past couple of years, we’re using exactly the same model, which is breakdown the products into, um, smaller chunks. Identify and isolate the risk. Make sure you can contain the risk from a funding perspective and keep that manageable. And then iterating, iterating, iterating off of that. And so that’s literally how we do things in the Valley. That’s exactly how things were doing things that the Jake and we’re hoping there’s some incredible work going on around Dev Ops Cloud Infrastructure, standardizing the A T o process etcetera. That I think is gonna have a huge impact on the way we develop code here at the d. O d. So not only from a development perspective, in terms of how we build products and scale them out, but also the development process itself is getting faster. So I think the next couple of years here at the d. O. D. It’s taken a little bit while and like I said, the hockey stick you invest, invest, invest. But I think all the right ideas and write fires are lit around that I think are gonna come together in a in a really good way of the next couple years. Okay, We’ll take just one or two more questions. I’m gonna go to Jackson Barnett from bed scoop if he’s on the line. Yes, thank you very much. There was a recent do the I G report that urged the d o d to be come up cohesive in its A i efforts is their current either study or project under way to understand the full scope of deal these AI efforts are you? How are you working across both service level AI task force and things like that to understand who is doing let’s and where you can collaborate on. So what kind of effort there? Yeah, good question. Eso on the i G report piece. Let me just say I had a couple of questions earlier about that as well. Um, things are moving so fast that when the i g report and then there was a rand report that all of you mentioned Ah, lot of those focused on the early days of the Jake standing it up. What? The issues are ex essentially for AI across the d, o. D and everything. Ironically, you know, we obviously love the transparency, having them done the report. It turns out that most or all of the issues were actually already either addressed by the time the report came out or even while the report was being written. We had addressed a couple of those issues, so we welcome the report. But you know, it’s really something that Jake is moving so fast, and things have changed so fast that many of them are no longer relevant to the broader question of how we’re synchronizing a I work across, um, the the main work that’s going on is what we call the E S C process, which is a three star level engagement process across thesis services, combatant commands and other parts of irony and others. So there are a number of sub committees committees that have been set up to address different parts of a technology policy and ethics training, testing, etcetera that are all actually meeting. And that has become the watering hole, if you may, for everybody to bring together a I work across the d. O. D. And that’s the whole idea. Is the idea of synchronization, which is the Jake is not supposed to be the central authority to do all the I work. We are not only we provide sort of scaling capabilities. We provide certain products that are scaled products. But for the most part, this is something I There’s something I sold from General. Shanahan is ah, you know, at the D. O. D. We don’t have a Department of Fire or Department of Electricity anymore because all of that has now just been integrated into the system. The hope and expectation is is that there doesn’t need to be a Department of AI at the D. O. D. Because AI is going to get integrated into its like the Internet. It’s like mobile phone development. When these new technologies came out, it took time for industry to absorb them into that. But now, for instance, nobody actually has a mobile phone development department anymore. We believe that simply the case is going to be the case for the D. O D. Next five years. Next 10 years. I don’t know how long, but absolutely certainly there’s probably going to be a centre of excellence for Ai, maybe in the future, but it’s going to look very, very different than what the Jake looks like today. Okay, so we have time for one more question, and I am going to go out to Mr, uh, Jeff struggle from task and purpose. Thank you for doing this. What is duty taking To make sure that artificial intelligence does not become self aware and declare war on humanity the big red switch in the back. But more seriously about self awareness. I I wouldn’t even know how to design an algorithm. Really? To make the thing anything self aware. Uh, but, you know, the tried answer I would give you is first is there’s policy and laws that we have toe, you know, follow. And I will tell you the other the other big learning I’ve had here at the D. O. D is that in the tech industry, if you’re dealing with personalization, let’s say on a page or you suggest a bad film to somebody by accident because of their browsing history or the training that data that was used, uh, the worst is you end up with a bad movie night or, you know, a bottle chomsky off online shopping site that you really didn’t want here. at the D. O. D. Things are taken very seriously in terms of systems that get deployed, which is why there tends to be this negative connotation that the D o d slow the government slow, etcetera. Well, it’s slow for a reason. There’s a maturity of technology you have to put in there. There’s testing evil that has taken very, very seriously here. The work that Jane and her team do is at par, or even more important than the product development that we do. So the care that gets attended to with things like a cognitive assistant or other things there were going to take this very deliberately and slowly when it comes to building products and feeling them and then training our troops and the workforce and how to wheel these products correctly. How to take feedback. We’re just in the early stages of that, but I think we’re taking a very deliberate. It may seem a little slower, but it is really, really important. Eso that outcome that you’re looking for, Um I don’t know, but I can tell you all the stuff we’re doing to hopefully prevent that in the future has gets good of unanswered. All right, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for attending today if you’re on the line and I didn’t get to your question. I’m so sorry. You can contact me afterwards. Most of you have my contacts and will help you get your question answered. Thanks very much for being here today and I’ll sign off. Thank you. Thanks so much. Thank you.