The Defense Department is projected to increase its spending on projects to research, develop, test and evaluate artificial intelligence-based systems from $1.44B in fiscal 2017 to $1.88B in fiscal 2019, Bloomberg Government reported Friday.
BGOV says the potential 30 percent growth in DoD’s AI RDT&E budget over the three-year period indicates that the department is working to bridge the “valley of death” gap between technology development and commercialization.
On Sept. 7, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency unveiled a multiyear, $2B investment effort to develop “third wave†AI technology platforms to facilitate human-machine teaming.
The AI Next campaign looks to explore key areas such as automation of DoD business processes, security of machine learning tools, management of power, data and performance efficiency and development of contextual reasoning methods.
A DARPA spokesperson told BGOV the majority of efforts would focus on basic and applied research activities.