Feb 25, 2022
Andy and Dave discuss the latest in AI news and research,
starting with the Aircrew Labor In-Cockpit Automation System
(ALIAS) program from DARPA, which flew a UH-60A Black Hawk
autonomously and without pilots on board, to include autonomous
(simulated) obstacle avoidance [1:05]. Another DARPA program,
Robotic Autonomy in Complex Environments with Resiliency (RACER)
entered its first phase, focused on high-speed autonomous driving
in unstructured environments, such as off-road terrain [2:39]. The
National Science Board releases its State of U.S. Science and
Engineering 2022 report, which shows the U.S. continues to lose its
leadership position in global science and engineering [4:30]. The
Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering, Heidi Shyu,
formally releases its technology priorities, 14 areas grouped into
three categories: seed areas, effective adoption areas, and
defense-specific areas [6:31]. In research, OpenAI creates
InstructGPT in an attempt to align language models to follow human
instructions better, resulting in a model with 100x fewer
parameters than GPT-3 and provided a user-favored output 70% of the
time, though still suffering from toxic output [9:37]. DeepMind
releases AlphaCode, which has succeeded in programming competitions
with an average ranking in the top 54% across 10 contests with more
than 5,000 participants each though it approaches the problem
through more of a brute-force approach [14:42]. DeepMind and the
EPFL’s Swiss Plasma Center also announce they have used
reinforcement learning algorithms to control nuclear fusion
(commanding the full set of control coils of a tokamak magnetic
controller). Venture City publishes Timelapse of AI (2028 – 3000+),
imagining how the next 1,000 years will play out for AI and the
human race [18:25]. And finally, with the Russia-Ukraine conflict
continuing to evolve, CNA’s Russia Program experts Sam Bendett and
Jeff Edmonds return to discuss what Russia has in its inventory
when it comes to autonomy and how they might use it in this
conflict, wrapping up insights from their recent paper on Russian
Military Autonomy in a Ukraine Conflict [22:52].