Pentagon using Grok – WTF

Defense Secretary [sic] / self styled Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced the Pentagon would integrate Elon Musk’s Grok models into military systems: “Last month I took the first step toward changing how the department does business with frontier AI technologies when we announced the rollout of GenAI with our partners from Google, and I want to thank the Google team for leaning forward and making the investment to get their Gemini app to about three million users in the War Department. But today we’re excited to announce the next frontier AI model company to join GenAI.mil, and that is Grok from xAI, which will go live later this month. So, I want to thank you, Elon, and your incredible team for leaning forward with us on this as well. Very soon, we will have the world’s leading AI models on every unclassified and classified network throughout our department, long overdue. To further that, today at my direction, we’re executing an AI acceleration strategy that will extend our lead in military AI established during President Trump’s first term. This strategy will unleash experimentation, eliminate bureaucratic barriers, focus on investments and demonstrate the execution approach needed to ensure we lead in military AI and that it grows more dominant into the future. In short, we will win this race by becoming an AI first warfighting force across all domains, from the back offices of the Pentagon to the tactical edge on the front lines. The catalyst for this acceleration will be seven pacesetting projects focused on mission threads across warfighting, intelligence and enterprise missions, each with a single accountable leader, aggressive timelines and measurable outcomes that answer a familiar question, Elon: what have you accomplished this week? This is the execution standard for AI first transformation. Each of the seven pacesetting projects will use the following model: one owner who reports monthly on their progress. These projects will not be run in a vacuum but will work directly with warfighters and transition partners to ensure we incorporate real time operational feedback. We expect rapid iterations with failure accelerating the learning curve. These are not science projects. They are not governance boards. They are the execution standard for the entire department. We will not win the future by sprinkling AI onto old tactics like digital pixie dust. We will win by discovering entirely new ways of fighting. That’s why we will run continuous experimentation campaigns, quarterly force on force combat labs with AI coordinated swarms, agent-based cyber defense and distributed command and control, pushing the envelope, learning from failure at every stop, which is exactly what this place does. You see, our department doesn’t accept failure in the past, and so we never fail, which means we never learn. We’re flipping that dynamic…”

See AP: “Just days after a global backlash erupted over Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok generating sexualized deepfakes of people, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said the Pentagon will embrace the technology. Hegseth said Monday that Grok will soon be deployed on “every unclassified and classified network” throughout the department. U.S. officials are endorsing the technology even as governments around the world have condemned it. Rising alarm from disparate nations points to the nightmarish potential of nudification apps that use artificial intelligence to generate sexually explicit deepfake images. Here’s a closer look…”