GenAl That Works For Indian Defence

Large language models, the core of the technology, have been repurposed for the sector, reports Ashutosh Mishra

-  ASHUTOSH MISHRA

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has taken every possible business, industry and government department by storm.

India's defence sector is not far behind. The rise of large language models (LLM), which are used to power GenAI products, has not left defence forces untouched.

India's Ministry of Defence set up an AI taskforce in 2018. By 2022, around 40 different GenAI products developed by defence public sector enterprises were in place.

The application of AI-based technology in defence covers many functions and possibilities such as training, surveillance, logistics, cybersecurity, unmanned aerial vehicles and others.

The defence and security sectors use LLMs for automating data processing, converting information to intelligence, analytics, summarisation and other purposes. (LLMS, according to one definition, are AI systems capable of understanding and generating human language by processing vast amounts of text data.) One security aspect to flag is that many defence institutions use the services of companies that provide localised and disconnected LLMS trained on existing sector-specific datasets and not connected to any Cloud service real time.

An offline LLM is less likely to suffer unauthorised access and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, reducing the risk of data leakage. In a DDoS attack, multiple com puters overwhelm a website or online service with excessive traffic and make it unavailable to users.