‘One-two punch’: Inside NGA’s approach to exploring powerful next-gen AI

The article discusses how the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), a U.S. government mapping agency, is starting to experiment with emerging large language models and other generative AI capabilities to enhance their production of assets that inform military operations.

The agency’s new Chief AI Officer, Mark Munsell, is leading this effort and is determined to explore and adopt these powerful frontier models responsibly. He is focussed on setting a clear direction for the agency for responsible implementation of AI’s capabilities in the daily operations

However, Munsell notes that the major companies developing these next-generation models have not prioritized geographic use cases that would impact NGA’s work, and he visualises that the agency has a major role to play in asking these companies to focus on certain capabilities that don’t exist yet or that the models do not perform well on.