Five months after launching its experimental AI-powered chatbot for the Department of the Air Force (DAF), officials from the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) are sharing early insights and offering a glimpse into the future of the platform.
The NIPRGPT platform was launched by the AFRL and the Air Force chief information officer (CIO) in June to provide airmen, guardians, and civilian DAF officials an AI chatbot that facilitates human-like conversations to complete various tasks.
During GovCIO’s AI Summit on Nov. 8, AFRL officials explained that in the few months since its deployment there has been a real excitement from users to test it out.
“We recognized that our people are under tremendous stress and toil loads in defense right now. This is a speed chess game, and they need augmentation. They need an ally when it comes to their relationship with knowledge and data,” said Alexis Bonnell, AFRL CIO and director of the AFRL Digital Capabilities Directorate.
NIPRGPT can answer questions and assist with tasks such as correspondence, background papers, and code, all within a secure computing environment. The GenAI tool serves as an experimental bridge to leverage GenAI on the Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network.
According to Bonnell, defense officials in search of a NIPRGPT solution are “just trying to get minutes on mission back.”
Currently the three main use cases that users are employing NIPRGPT for are summarization of documents, drafting of documents, and coding assistance.
In a separate session, Amanda Bullock, the AI lead at AFRL, explained that NIPRGPT provides users a “safe place … so that when we do get those commercial [AI] tools, they know what they’re doing, they don’t have a learning curve to get through.”
“[NIPRGPT] is, at its heart, a research experiment. We do not think that NIPRGPT is going to be the tool that goes forward,” Bullock said. “We actually hope that as these commercial tools come online, they vastly surpass the capabilities of NIPRGPT.”
Bonnell explained that the goal is not a full deployment of NIPRGPT but for “officials to create a knowledge universe around themselves” without the CIO getting in the way.
“[Previously] the way that people have this relationship with knowledge is that they would come to me and say, ‘Please, ma’am, may we have some information on porridge … and hopefully I was a benevolent CIO and I would say yes, we can put something like that together … But the reality is, what we put together was very rarely something that helped everyone … What I am watching is people create a knowledge universe around themselves. And what I am asking is, how do I get out of the way?”
Additionally, Bullock explained that the AFRL NIPRGPT team has helped facilitate that “knowledge universe” as officials begin to seek better features beyond NIPRGPT.
“We’re also finding out that they, as they get more and more excited about these tools, they want better and better features,” Bullock said. “That’s where we meet with them and we say, ‘Look, this is not what you need. What you need is one of our commercial partner tools. What you need already exists out there from this small business.’”
