The Chinese People’s Army links its AI with commercial ones to predict its opponent’s moves
Chinese scientists are teaching an experimental military artificial intelligence (AI) to deal with unpredictable human enemies with the help of ChatGPT-like technologies. According to scientists involved in the project, a research laboratory of the People's Liberation Army's (PLA) Strategic Support Force, which oversees the Chinese military's space, cyber, intelligence and electronic warfare, has created a physical link between the its AI system and Baidu's Ernie and iFlyTek's Spark , which are large language models similar to ChatGPT.
Military AI can convert large amounts of sensor data and information reported by front-line units into descriptive language or images and transmit it to commercial models. After they confirm that they understand, the military AI automatically generates requests for further information on various tasks, such as combat simulations. The entire process is completely devoid of human involvement.
Meanwhile, a computer scientist expressed concern about this move, saying that if it is not handled carefully, it could lead to a situation similar to that depicted in the Terminator films.
The project was described in detail in an article published in December 2023 in the Chinese academic journal Command Control & Simulation. In the paper, scientist Sun Yifeng and his team from PLA's Information Engineering University wrote that both humans and machines could benefit from the project.
“Simulation results aid human decision making… and can be used to refine the machine's reserve of combat knowledge and further improve the machine's level of combat cognition,” they wrote.
This is the first time the Chinese military has publicly confirmed the use of large-scale commercial language models. For security reasons, military computing facilities are generally not directly connected to civilian networks. The Sun team did not provide details on the connection between the two systems, but stressed that this work was preliminary and for research purposes.
Sun and his colleagues said their goal is to make military AI more “human-like,” capable of better understanding the intentions of commanders at all levels and communicating more skillfully with humans.
Most existing military AI is based on traditional war gaming systems. Although their capabilities have advanced rapidly, users often feel they are more like a machine than a living being.
Furthermore, when faced with cunning and unpredictable human enemies, machines can be fooled. However, large commercial language models, which have studied almost all aspects of society, including literary works, news reports and historical documents, can help military AI understand people better.
In the paper, Sun's team talked about one of its experiments that simulated a US military invasion of Libya in 2011. The military AI provided Ernie with information about the weapons and deployment of both armies. After several rounds of dialogue, Ernie was able to predict the US military's next move.
Sun's team said such predictions can compensate for human weaknesses. “As a higher form of life, humans are not perfect in cognition and often have persistent beliefs, also known as biases,” the Sun team wrote in the article. “This can lead to situations of overestimation or underestimation of threats on the battlefield. Machine-assisted human situation awareness has become an important development direction.”
Sun's team also said that there are still some communication issues between the military and commercial models, as the latter were not developed specifically for warfare. For example, Ernie's forecasts are sometimes vague and give only a general idea of attack strategies, without the specifics that military commanders need.
And if the enemy's response was to use another AI, where would this military AI go? What if the other party created an ad hoc communication to mislead you? The future
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The article The Chinese People's Army links its AI with commercial ones to predict the opponent's moves comes from Economic Scenarios .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/lesercito-popolare-cinese-collega-la-sua-ai-con-quelle-commerciali-per-prevedere/ on Sat, 13 Jan 2024 06:30:31 +0000.