The Download: how the military is using AI, and AI’s climate promises
For much of last year, US Marines conducting training exercises in the waters off South Korea, the Philippines, India, and Indonesia were also running an experiment. The service members in the unit responsible for sorting through foreign intelligence and making their superiors aware of possible local threats were for the first time using generative AI to do it, testing a leading AI tool the Pentagon has been funding.
Two officers tell us that they used the new system to help scour thousands of pieces of open-source intelligence—nonclassified articles, reports, images, videos—collected in the various countries where they operated, and that it did so far faster than was possible with the old method of analyzing them manually.
Though the US military has been developing computer vision models and similar AI tools since 2017, the use of generative AI—tools that can engage in human-like conversation—represent a newer frontier. Read the full story.
—James O’Donnell
Why the climate promises of AI sound a lot like carbon offsets
The International Energy Agency states in a new report that AI could eventually reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, possibly by much more than the boom in energy-guzzling data center development pushes them up.
The finding echoes a point that prominent figures in the AI sector have made as well to justify, at least implicitly, the gigawatts’ worth of electricity demand that new data centers are placing on regional grid systems across the world.
