[1/4] Technicians from the Israeli Army’s Operational Data and Application Unit Matspen meet at the IDF base garrison in Ramat Gan, Israel June 11, 2023.Reuters/Neil Elias
RAMAT GAN, Israel, June 13 (Reuters) – During last month’s Gazamini War, Israeli military commanders were the first to use the bot “Knowledge Well,” which provides a real-time overview of Palestinian rocket launches (where , when it was done) rates and coverage – on a platform modeled after WhatsApp.
In preparation for the next flare-up, Col. Eli Birenbaum, head of the military’s operational data and applications division, plans to use aggregate artificial intelligence to predict salvoes.
“It’s an interesting leap forward,” he said in an interview with Reuters.
By 2028, about half of Israel’s military engineers will be focused on AI, said Birenbaum, who in 2016 headed the first machine learning platform designed to detect hacking attempts. said it was part of an ongoing change since then.
He said the company now has “hundreds” of people working on a wide range of AI-related projects, accounting for 20% of military engineers. Within five years, he predicted that number would be in the thousands.
He has government backing, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledging to increase the defense budget and make Israel an AI “powerhouse.”
But that becomes a bottleneck for staffing. By eliminating low-level coding roles, AI relegates humans to jobs that require extensive training.
Creating a data scientist from scratch is like saying, “I’m telling an 18-year-old kid, ‘Look, this is your future. It’s like saying,” Birenbaum said, at a base near Tel Aviv where computer rooms were packed, and troops conferring quietly around screens amidst a vortex of giant server cooling systems.
During two years of mandatory service for women and 32 months for men, military engineers earn $335 a month. In the first few years of their service, Birenbaum said their salaries would rise to about $2,300, well below the $8,400 they would earn in comparable civilian jobs.
“It’s no secret that I can’t compete with Google or Facebook salaries,” he said. “What can I offer? Something meaningful.”
“We don’t fix program buttons. We solve national problems. It’s not finding the needle in one haystack, it’s eight, eighty, eight thousand. Finding a needle in a haystack.”
Militaries around the world are pondering the moral implications of an AI arms race. For Israel, AI target acquisition does not mean automated target destruction, Birenbaum stressed. “In the near future there will always be someone involved in communicating information,” he said.
By Dan Williams. Edited by Supantha Mukherjee and Nick Macfie
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