JACK MAVEN AND THE "MAJOR"....THEN ALONG CAME FLUFFY

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That includes getting acquisition program managers, traditionally focused on the physical performance of the weapons they are developing, fielding, and sustaining, to consider data as “part of the life-cycle management process just as much as the hardware is,” Shanahan said. “I see signs of the services beginning to have that conversation about future weapons systems.”

To push updates to the system, Shanahan’s team similarly had to travel to physically install newer versions at military installations. Today, Maven is getting software updates every month or so—fast for government work, but still not fast enough, he adds. CEO Sundar Pichai also ruled out "technologies that gather or use information for surveillance violating internationally accepted norms," or "technologies whose purpose contravenes widely accepted principles of international law and human rights." Project Maven showed Shanahan just how hard the data wrangling could get. The aim of Maven was to analyze huge amounts of drone surveillance video that human analysts couldn’t keep up with, training machine-learning algorithms to recognize hints of terrorist activity and report it. It’s less a question of standards and more of policies and governance,” he told me. “We now have to think about data as a strategic asset in its own right. Now, a much better approach to drive interoperability is to start with a discussion of metadata standards that are as lightweight as possible, as well as a Modular Open Systems Architecture. Or put another way, we need to agree on the definition of ‘AI Ready’ when it comes to our weapon systems.” Autonomous Ground Reconnaissance & Surveillance: This involves adding Maven-style analysis algorithms to more kinds of scout drones and even ground robots, so the software can call humans’ attention to potential threats and targets without someone having to watch every frame of video.

CDAO is responsible for continuing development on the non-GEOINT lines of effort until such time as they are ready to transition to follow-on mission partners,” which will be fully moved over by fiscal 2025, statements from the press officials said. They also noted that “ongoing work post-transitioned will be overseen by [I&S,]” and that “details of that oversight function are still being established.”

Many questions remain about how Maven and its complex components will function and scale once that transition is completed early next month. But at this point, one thing is clear: This shift marks a significant waypoint in the project’s evolution and will likely influence the military’s ability to win future wars with AI and associated advanced technologies. In a statement, the Pentagon welcomed the report, which speaks to the immense challenges facing the US military in embracing a technology that it sees as integral to a possible conflict with Russia or China. “The speed, the op tempo of that conflict will be so fast,” Shanahan says. “Twenty years from now we'll be looking at algorithms versus algorithms.” Maldivian sunsets are a thing of beauty. It’s difficult to do them justice with words or even images. A personal highlight of the entire trip was the sunset cruise. My wife and I spent the evening on a dhoni (a traditional Maldivian boat) with a personal crew of three, and sailed out into the middle of the ocean to spend the evening watching the sunset, uninterrupted, in all its glory. En route, a family of dolphins appeared in the water beside us and proceeded to perform a series of jumps in the air alongside the boat. If I didn’t know better, I would have sworn that they had been paid to appear beside us on cue. Google says that it is no longer “developing custom AI/ML solutions to facilitate upstream extraction” for the oil and gas industry, but it is not clear if it provides custom solutions to midstream and downstream companies, or whether it provides non-custom solutions for upstream extraction.There’s a kids’ club which provides daily doses of fun for young children as well as an activity centre for teenagers, and for adults there’s a pool-side bar, deli, an internet café and daily morning yoga. There’s also a zumba instructor who really loves his job. A lot. And there are regular ocean excursions where you can swim and seek out turtles, sharks and countless other underwater creatures from the cast of Finding Dory.