On the Military Applications of Large Language Models

TL;DR

This paper explores the potential military applications of large language models like GPT, analyzing their capabilities, feasibility, and how commercial cloud services can support their deployment in defense contexts.

Contribution

It provides a critical assessment of GPT-based models' military uses and evaluates the practicality of building such applications using commercial cloud platforms.

Findings

Language models' summarization and generative abilities enable various military applications.

Commercial cloud services can facilitate the development of military LLM applications.

Certain features of LLMs are particularly suited for defense-related tasks.

Abstract

In this paper, military use cases or applications and implementation thereof are considered for natural language processing and large language models, which have broken into fame with the invention of the generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) and the extensive foundation model pretraining done by OpenAI for ChatGPT and others. First, we interrogate a GPT-based language model (viz. Microsoft Copilot) to make it reveal its own knowledge about their potential military applications and then critically assess the information. Second, we study how commercial cloud services (viz. Microsoft Azure) could be used readily to build such applications and assess which of them are feasible. We conclude that the summarization and generative properties of language models directly facilitate many applications at large and other features may find particular uses.