DARPA Hosts Workshops To Develop 'Trustworthy AI'.

• Author: Luckenbaugh, Josh

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is seeking help understanding the best ways to use artificial intelligence for national security.

In June, DARPA will hold the first of two workshops with industry, academia and other government entities as part of its AI Forward initiative, during which the agency hopes to bridge the "fundamental gap" between the AI innovation going on in commercial industry and the Defense Department, said Dr. Matt Turek, deputy director of DARPA's Information Innovation Office.

"Commercial industry has... been making significant investments and developing highly capable --or seemingly capable--systems," Turek said in an interview. "But those systems might not be well aligned for DoD use cases."

Current commercial AI systems can likely handle "low-risk decision-making," Turek said, "but if you think about mission-critical decision-making to the DoD, in those cases we can't suffer failures, and we need to be able to predict and understand perhaps in detail how systems might respond."

For example, large language models such as ChatGPT are "very compelling" for generating text or creating documents--tasks that are "relatively low risk," he said. However, "if you think about applying it to critical domains" such as "looking at a large body of intel reporting and summarizing it" for the Defense Department or an intelligence agency, "even there these models start to break down.

"There's evidence of them hallucinating information that wasn't necessarily there, or making up citations to scientific publications that were never written," he continued. "Those sort of things would be fraud in the context of an intelligence analysis process," highlighting "the dichotomy between what might be appropriate for commercial use cases, and then how that might not currently meet DoD needs."

AI Forward will serve as DARPA's "engagement mechanism" with the community, Turek said. The program will kick off with a virtual workshop from June 13-16, followed by an in-person event in Boston July 31-Aug. 2, during which participants will have an opportunity to brainstorm new directions toward trustworthy AI with applications for national security, a DARPA release said.

Turek declined to say how many applications DARPA received for AI Forward, but he anticipates the acceptance rate being in the 25 to 30 percent range, with participants coming from academia, industry and government and representing a variety of AI-related disciplines, such...