The online tool, dubbed CLARA, is designed to increase visibility and overall understanding of the department’s AI-related initiatives by serving as a centralized repository that provides information, progress and potential collaboration opportunities on projects, the DAF CIO noted Monday in a post on LinkedIn. The goal is to ensure stakeholders across the department stay informed and aligned in regards to these types of technologies.

“Every warfighter deserves clarity on the tools and capabilities at their disposal,” Acting DAF Chief Data and AI Officer Chandra Donelson said in a statement. “Transparent access to our resources ensures everyone is more equipped and ready to excel in any mission.”

Much like the rest of the Pentagon, the Department of the Air Force has been exploring how to leverage advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities for the Air and Space Forces. The DAF has been experimenting with new technologies and launched pilot efforts focusing on how AI can assist both services — ranging from day-to-day tasks to tactical operations.

With a number of programs underway, CLARA will be used to monitor progress, spending and potential duplicative initiatives, DAF CIO Venice Goodwine said Monday during a keynote speech at the annual Department of the Air Force Information Technology and Cyberpower conference.

“One of the things Congress has levied upon us is we must be able to have an AI inventory so we can report how much money we’re spending on AI,” Goodwine said. “But importantly, how are we tracking the time back on mission for our airmen and guardians? CLARA is a way in which we’re going to do that.”

In April, officials set up a DAF AI Launch Point to act as a “one-stop shop” for all of the department’s emerging artificial intelligence capabilities, Goodwine said. The website includes information on policies, strategy, training and education, as well as the AI Exchange App Store where airmen and guardians can begin experimenting with AI-enabled technologies.

Among those new tools is NIPRGPT 1.0 — a generative AI chatbot hosted on the Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNet). Released in June in collaboration with the Air Force Research Laboratory, the experimental platform allows the DAF to test different large language models and learn how they can be used in real-world scenarios.

NIPRGPT 1.0 has enabled experimentation with some open-source large language models, such as Meta’s Llama family of LLMs and Mistral AI, Goodwine noted.

Under what is being called NIPRGPT 1.0+, the department is looking to incorporate a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) model to combine large language models with the department’s internal data.

“What we want to show you which model is best for which use case,” Goodwine said.

Along with NIPRGPT, the department’s AI Exchange platform also includes redForce AI — a DevOps platform that supports rapid artificial intelligence capability development for warfighters — and the Mission-Driven Autonomous Collaborative Heterogeneous Intelligent Network Architecture (MACHINA), which is part of the Space Force’s space domain awareness network architecture. 

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Launched by the Air Force chief information officer and the Air Force Research Laboratory on Monday, the so-called NIPRGPT platform will allow airmen, guardians, civilian employees and contractors to interact with a chatbot on the Non-classified Internet Protocol Router Network (NIPRNet).

The GenAI-powered platform is not a final product for users, but rather a way for the department to experiment with generative AI tech in real-world scenarios as it continues to explore the capability’s potential, according to a press release.

“Technology is learned by doing,” Chandra Donelson, the DAF’s acting chief data and artificial intelligence officer, said in a statement. “As our warfighters, who are closest to the problems, are learning the technology, we are leveraging their insight to inform future policy, acquisition and investment solutions.”

According to the department, users can have human-like conversations with NIPRGPT in order to ask queries and receive assistance on various tasks, including correspondence, background papers and code. The platform is freely available to users with a Department of Defense Common Access Card, and interactions between the chatbot and human users occur in a secure environment.

As an experimental platform, the Air Force plans to focus on various key metrics of NIPRGPT’s performance — including “computational efficiency, resource utilization, security compliance” and more — in order to gauge generative AI’s “practical applications and challenges and ensure that future implementation is effective and efficient,” a DAF news release stated.

The department is encouraging users to provide feedback on NIPRGPT to help inform potential future integration of the technology. The platform will function as a “critical bridge” as the department works with the commercial sector to deploy the capabilities while navigating “intense security parameters and other processes,” Air Force Research Lab CIO Alexis Bonnel said.

“Changing how we interact with unstructured knowledge is not instant perfection; we each must learn to use the tools, query, and get the best results,” Bonnell said in a statement. “NIPRGPT will allow Airmen and Guardians to explore and build skills and familiarity as more powerful tools become available.” 

NPIRGPT is also part of AFRL’s Dark Saber software platform — a software engineering ecosystem of airmen and guardians equipped with the tools needed to develop and deploy next-generation software and operational capabilities.

Organizations across the Defense Department have been exploring how generative AI could be used to assist the military in both day-to-day and tactical operations. The technology is a subfield of artificial intelligence that uses large language models to generate content based on prompts and data they are trained on.

In 2023, the Pentagon set up Task Force Lima to assess and synchronize generative AI exploration and adoption across the department. Some large language models have been deployed for use in limited environments at DOD, such as Microsoft’s GPT-4. The Navy also launched its own AI-powered chatbot last summer, although the platform is not powered by large language models.

Meanwhile, the Department of the Air Force recently wrapped up a series of roundtables with industry and academia to explore how and where generative AI can be used for its operations. CIO Venice Goodwine said in a statement that the roundtables demonstrated that generative AI is actively growing.

“Now is the time to give our Airmen and Guardians the flexibility to develop the necessary skills in parallel,” Goodwine said. “There are multiple modernization efforts going on right now across the federal government and within the DAF to get tools in the hands of the workforce. This tool is another one of those efforts.”

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The Air Force CDAO position was previously held by Eileen Vidrine, who retired last month after a long career in government service.

Donelson’s responsibilities as acting CDAO will include overseeing development and implementation of “DAF-wide strategies for enterprise data management, analytics, digital transformation, and responsible/ethical artificial intelligence to optimize performance and drive innovation in and across all missions and operations,” the department’s chief information officer said Tuesday in a LinkedIn post announcing the appointment.

CDAO objectives include helping the department become “AI-ready” by 2025 and “AI-competitive” by 2027; addressing ethics considerations for mission systems and programs; developing a more digitally savvy workforce; and expanding partnerships with other Department of Defense components, government agencies, industry and academia, according to the office.

Artificial intelligence and IT are key modernization priorities for the U.S. military, which aims to use these capabilities to support battlefield missions and back-office tasks.

Prior to being tapped for her new position, Donelson served in a number of roles at the Pentagon related to these types of technologies.

She will be dual-hatted as the Space Force’s data and AI officer — a position she has held since December — responsible for developing and overseeing the implementation of initiatives across the branch, including strategies, policies and standards for data acquisition, storage, processing and security, according to her LinkedIn profile and the CIO’s announcement.

While previously working at the Department of the Army Headquarters, G-2 intelligence directorate, Donelson was deputy chief data officer from 2021 to 2023 and OSINT data manager from 2017 to 2021, according to her official bio.

She also served as an enlisted intelligence operations specialist in the Air Force and is currently an Air Force reservist supporting U.S. Central Command’s J-2 intelligence directorate.

Donelson holds master’s degrees in IT from Texas A&M University-Texarkana and data science and analytics in high-performance computing from the University of Missouri-Columbia, among other degrees, according to her bio.

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