Recent AI Adoption in the U.S. Government

The pace of U.S. government adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is heating up. Year-over-year funding for AI in the Pentagon alone has more than doubled to $4B in FY 2020. In September 2018, Accenture published research that indicated over 66% of U.S. federal agencies planned to make investments in AI technologies in the next year. Another finding from the same report indicated 82% of federal executives agreed with the statement “AI will work next to humans in my organization, as a co-worker, collaborator, and trusted advisor” in the next 2 years.

As an interesting parallel from the private sector, consider DeepMind’s recent advances with AI in Go, the ancient Chinese strategy board game. Despite Go being infinitely more complex than Chess, the progress has been breathtaking: In March 2016, DeepMind’s AlphaGo machine defeated the Korean grandmaster of Go, Lee Sedol, in 4 out of 5 games. In May 2017, AlphaGo went on to defeat the #1 ranked Go player in the world, Ke Jie, in 3 out of 3 games. Just a few months after that stunning victory, DeepMind’s successor to AlphaGo, called AlphaGoZero, played its own predecessor (machine vs. machine) in 100 games. In that matchup, AlphaGoZero won every single game.