DARPA Chief Touts Artificial Intelligence Efforts
The United States is no laggard on investment and advances in artificial intelligence technologies, Steven Walker, director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, told reporters on Thursday, disputing assertions by top U.S. technology executives that China was racing ahead.
“I think I’d put our AI, our country’s efforts, up against anybody,” Walker said at an event hosted by the Defense Writers Group. DARPA “helped create the field in the early 1960s” and since then has consistently invested in the three waves of artificial intelligence technologies, Walker said.
DARPA is “investing pretty heavily” in so-called third-wave AI systems, where machines understand the context and the environment in which they operate and are able to explain their reasoning and decision making to human operators, Walker said. “These are very nascent efforts but they’re going to be important if you want the warfighter to trust the machine and help him or her make decisions.”
Walker’s assertions of U.S. strengths in AI come as Eric Schmidt, CEO of Alphabet, the parent of Google, has been warning in recent weeks about China overtaking the United States in artificial intelligence-enabled technologies across the board. At a Washington event in November, Schmidt said that the United States’ edge in the field could be quickly eclipsed by Beijing, which has announced a goal of becoming a global leader in AI by 2030.
The first wave of artificial intelligence refers to strictly rules-based efforts by machines to mimic human thinking such as playing chess or computing taxes. The second wave refers to pattern recognition where computers learn to identify objects and patterns after being trained on extremely large data sets of images.
Walker said the second-wave technologies that are already in use, such as facial recognition technologies or image processing of drone video by the U.S. military, are still brittle and can be easily tricked. “If you put new data into the database they’ll start to fail,” Walker said, adding that DARPA was investing in technologies to make such pattern-recognition systems more robust.
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