The government is far behind on ML/AI. I don't see any evidence this effort is going to help them catch up.

In fact, the department of defense is far behind even the department of energy inside the US government on high performance computing, algorithms and machine learning.

How would you know? I would guess that the DoD is not particularly interested in releasing lots of information about their capabilities.

Second, the Department of Energy isn't just a random department with a lot of spare computing power. They run the National Labs, and part of that work is to make supercomputing available to academic and industrial researchers too. These are also used for nuclear-related projects (part of the DoE's mandate, but obviously related to DoD concerns too) and I would bet that there is some mechanism to boot off academic researchers if the national interest suddenly required exaflops of computation,

This is actually something pretty easy to learn. If you pay attention to the business solicitations on FedBizOpps [0], you can see the whole swath of what each DoD entity wants to achieve in the next year or two, because they lay it all out explicitly.

[0] https://www.fbo.gov/

How can you know this? Would DARPA or the DoD tell us about their advances?

I would imagine that the publics knowledge about their advancements is significantly far behind what it actually is.

DARPA funds work, it doesn't do it itself.

Isn't this fairly normal?

I seem to recall that the DoE, NOAA, and NASA always had a lot of computing resources, and that they generally rented time on those clusters out to other government agencies.

I do wish the government would step up on AI though -- I think that they owe it to the country to put together a Manhattan Project for AI.

Perhaps normal, but the concern is that this could be a strategic disadvantage versus countries that are massively boosting these programs.

The Chinese government is leading (and funding) massive efforts in high performance computing and AI. If they win, entire high tech industries could be situated in (and lead by) China.

I'm troubled by the DoD actions on AI, but not by who owns the supercomputers in the US.

It actually works out better if the US government computers are through various science organization labs, because it locates much of their computing power in places also accessible to universities and at agencies amenable to US universities using their resources. So funding computers through the DoE, NOAA, NASA, etc actually makes them more available for the US research community, while allowing the military to lease the time they need (eg, for calculating explosion dynamics).

The total funding for US supercomputers also could be higher, but that's a general problem with US infrastructure investment.

My main point was there's no real concern with the computers being owned by scientific institutions instead of the military -- they're still government funded, it just makes them more widely accessible for use.

>I think that they owe it to the country to put together a Manhattan Project for AI.

I hope we can come up with a better primary goal for AI than mass murder

I highly doubt the government (or, at least DARPA,) is. See e.g. https://www.darpa.mil/attachments/AIFull.pdf, or https://www.darpa.mil/program/probabilistic-programming-for-...

Neither of that are impressive? The issue is that they don't publish a ton of papers, but TBH those look like the projects of an organization that is slow moving and behind the times.

You are not going to see many research papers with DARPA staff as an authors. That's just not how they work.

Instead, they contract with academic and industrial researchers to work on specific things that are (or might someday be) of particular interest to the DoD. Thus, if there's a huge DARPA-funded breakthrough in Probabilistic Programming, it's going to have (say) Frank Woods' and Oxford University's name on it, not the DARPA program manager's. The final work might not even be published. They're happy to fund industrial groups if that lays the groundwork for products that the DoD eventually wants to buy.

They're also (currently?) running a competition for distribution of radio bandwidth amongst peers using ML, iirc

I first learned about Machine learning from Darpa in 2008, so I doubt they are behind

uh, machine learning has been a going thing for decades. Ray Kurzweil was selling OCR in the late 70s.

Well it was called AI back then.

Not even close. Also, machine learning is a subfield of AI.

https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/37618/who-coined-the-...