Hadean’s Innovation team’s resident data scientist, Dan Gorringe, won the bronze medal at the Defence AI Centre and Dstl’s LLM hackathon during Google Cloud Next!
The journey to success was enabled by a partnership with subject matter experts from the Royal Air Force (RAF). The team embarked on the ambitious mission of creating an LLM-based system designed for the rapid exploration of UK military doctrine, by using Google’s Vertex AI tools. Baptised “Bard of War”, the system was designed to use AI to assess British military doctrine alignment to strategic planning. Bard of War covers joint operations by analysing the doctrinal parameters across all domains and their respective services; the British Army, Royal Navy, Royal Air Force, and UK Space Command – striving towards greater outcomes for combined operations.
The hackathon brought together technical minds from across the UK Ministry of Defence, Google, and wider industry, all driven by the common goal of using LLMs in defence contexts to make the UK safer. The team started strongly by using the publicly-available doctrine with Vertex AI’s conversational AI tools to quickly create chatbots that you could use for Q&A. To build a more complete solution, the team then made use of, Vertex’s endpoints for search and Google AI’s Bison LLM. In two days the team had a demo scoring the doctrinal adherence of orders issued – which they showed off in their pitch to a panel at the end of the hackathon’s second day.
The judges overseeing this event were senior representatives from the Defence AI Centre, jHub Defence Innovation, GCHQ, and Google. Their presence highlights the government’s commitment to advancing the application of AI in defence.
After much deliberation from the judges, congratulations are in order, not only to the Bard of War Team (including our very own Dan Gorringe) for their well-deserved bronze medal but also to all the participants who displayed their enthusiasm in harnessing AI to make the UK safer. The organisers also deserve a round of applause for putting together a fantastic event.
This builds on Hadean’s success in pushing the solving some of the most complex technological challenges in defence. Our objective is to enable the military to harness this technology: gaining a strategic edge, augmenting our decision making, and optimising force preparation and readiness.
As we celebrate Dan’s success at Google Cloud Next, we also look forward to the continued exploration of AI in defence and beyond. Our Innovation team is spearheading Hadean’s rapid development of AI-enabled Pattern of Life and is actively integrating LLMs into our Hadean Platform for Defence, as was demonstrated at DSEI 2023.
To read the full announcement click here.
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