A key supplier to the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies is building a $20 million supercomputer with buzzy chipmaker Nvidia to speed deployment of artificial intelligence capabilities across the U.S. federal government, the MITRE think tank said Tuesday. MITRE, a federally funded, not-for-profit research organization that has supplied U.S. soldiers and spies with exotic technical products since the 1950s, says the project could improve everything from Medicare to taxes. “There’s huge opportunities for AI to make government more efficient,” said Charles Clancy, senior vice president of MITRE. “Government is inefficient, it’s bureaucratic, it takes forever to get stuff done. … That’s the grand vision, is how do we do everything from making Medicare sustainable to filing your taxes easier?” This AI project is an example of the flurry of activity prompted by the Biden administration’s all-of-government push to ensure the United States remains the world’s leading AI power. Biden signed an executive order in October that ordered accelerated research and deployment of AI across federal agencies, as China makes efforts to catch up. The MITRE supercomputer will be based in Ashburn, Va., and should be up and running late this year. MITRE was spun out of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology lab in 1958 and is part of a network of Pentagon-funded research and development centers set up in the early years of the Cold War that also includes Rand and the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill. For decades, MITRE has been a supplier of surveillance, communications and cybersecurity technologies to the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies. “We go way beyond what people would typically call IT,” is how a former MITRE chief executive described their research to Forbes magazine, which reported its projects included a prototype tool that could hack smartwatches and software for the FBI that can capture fingerprints from photos of suspects’ hands on social media websites.
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