Just like the great points offered from the YC Partners, here’s five simple things to also not do (or stop doing) in Defense Innovation for new businesses. In no particular offensive order:

In short, Machine Learning is currently viewed as the more worthy investment so it gets the focus, and GenAI is a wonderful thing for our adversaries to waste their money on pursuing. Agree or disagree, that was the doomer message coming from experts on the panel, leaving only the commercial reps to try and salvage some kind of worth to pursuing the technology in a meaningful way within the DoD.

Success is a team sport, and you need to play the game to be able to win. There are rules, loopholes, skills, and experience that all go into compiling a winning game. Unsportsmanlike conduct is not a winning strategy for any game.

Too many great capabilities die the slow death of patient starvation waiting for government facilitation. The video clip below is a masterclass in the results of that reality. Don’t let this be your fate in the Defense Sector! Get ahead and equip your team well for the trip through the valley of death.

Big action only happens from Rule Followers in response to Rule Breakers, so you are the primary driving force for change. It’s never fun being a martyr, or watching well meaning folks get crucified by rules upon a wall of No’s. It sucks, it’s demoralizing, and it burns people out. But that sacrifice does have great impact, though usually just not directly.

Allow me to introduce to you a few of the best people I know doing Generative AI work in the Air Force today. As a Chief, we have all the stripes on our rank for a reason. It gives us a shield to protect our people, but also a platform to lift others up. Allow me to do just that by spotlighting MSgt Jared Rice, Capt Richard Smith, and Mr Brad Aldridge, MDE. All three shining examples of the great folks across the department doing the hard work to transform Generative AI use cases into capabilities.

Fear is a mile wide, but only a foot deep. We fill our own ocean of fear with all of our worries and concerns. We churn the storms that rage across that ocean with the winds of constant change that drive all our lives. It can be a perilous scene that strikes deep into the hearts of us all.

A defense innovator is someone who facilitates change from within the military system. This takes on a myriad number of forms, but the common thread is the facilitation of change through and within the military system. It’s not a mutiny of the willing against the tyranny of the complacent. It is an evolutionary process that takes work, coordination, and the will power of trained professionals to execute everyday.

I am not an astronaut, but I have become something so much more. When I was a child, all I wanted to be was an astronaut. I went to space events, watched space shows, and dreamed of how amazing it would be to go to space one day. But time always marches forward, and priorities have a way of changing. I found myself grown up in career I never expected, in places I never thought I would go, doing things that child I was could never imagine.

Too many great capabilities die the slow death of patient starvation waiting for government facilitation. The video clip below is a masterclass in the results of that reality. Don’t let this be your fate in the Defense Sector! Get ahead and equip your team well for the trip through the valley of death.

You can reverse engineer the best leads for technology collaboration, partnerships, and sales from public defense contracting data. All the RFPs and approved contracts for defense organizations big and small are publicly available. Want to know what the AI priorities are, and who is funding them? Want to know the trends in AI applications for DoD? All this and more is not hard to figure out, and modern Generative AI tools make this easier than ever.

"What are the DoD Generative AI Needs?"I gets asked this question repeatedly at least once a day. Instead of me just giving you a hand wavy response, let's do something different.

The secret to military sales is understanding the audience and their environment. Contractor states, “I'm struggling to know what's a great product for the mission or not.” Who is the market and what to sell them are the two single most important questions in defense contracting. The answer to each is also not obvious, and often learned the hard way. Let me help you deal with that pain.

A RIDICULOUS war rages in online communities across social media over DoD GenAI software development. The gnashing of teeth across Internet enclaves of DoD members and defense contractors yesterday seemed to reach a new fever pitch. With more folks publicizing internally developed DoD projects like NIPRGPT, and the inevitable drumbeat of defense contractor backlash for non-commercial development was quite loud. It’s all a bit much at this point, so I think it’s important to level set some expectations for folks who either forgot or haven’t learned yet from experience.

I’m getting really tired of seeing things I really want to buy, but are apparently just visualizations of someone’s very genius Generative AI musings.

Hope everyone has a wonderful holiday season. Plenty of time to relax, decompress, and spend time with loved ones. Invariably I always find myself in the random conversation with friends and family about, “what is it exactly that you do?”

I’ll be the first to confirm that life is not fair, things never go the way you hope, nor are all opportunities seized upon. That is all to say there are always plenty of reasons anyone to complain, and as such a constant drum beat of many to their dissatisfaction of the current situation as they see it. But that doesn’t mean that hope is lost, and it obscures the many whole toil behind the scenes to build a better future.

I had the opportunity the other day to have a fascinating discussion about roadblocks to change in the DoD, especially as it applies to Great Power Competition. One of the main points brought up was the philosophical differences between service providers and warfighters, and how that fundamentally influences all resulting aspects of their operations.

Not a one size fits all solution, but rather just the map of the possible for what an automated data refinery could be. Remember like the physical commodities refineries, the goal of each process is to go from raw to processed, not raw to perfect. Use cases are unique, and require the right tools.

Another example of using GPT-4V to perform image analysis. Bonus points for those who figure out what/where this image is depicting (and why that makes the results controversial).