Artificial Intelligence

In late 2025, the U.S. Department of Defense launched GenAI.mil, a groundbreaking enterprise artificial intelligence platform designed to bring generative AI tools into everyday use across the military and defense workforce. Just two months after its launch, GenAI.mil has already surpassed 1 million unique users and is poised to transform how the Pentagon works, plans, and fights with AI-enabled capabilities. 

The concept of artificial intelligence can be traced back to ancient history, where myths and stories imagined intelligent machines brought to life by human hands. From mechanical automatons in Greek mythology to early clockwork inventions, the idea that intelligence could exist outside the human mind has fascinated people for centuries. However, it was not until the mid-20th century that artificial intelligence emerged as a formal field of study. In 1950, Alan Turing published his landmark paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” introducing what would later be known as the Turing Test. This test proposed evaluating a machine’s intelligence based on its ability to exhibit behavior indistinguishable from that of a human during conversation.

Ethical concerns in AI often begin with abstract questions. Is the data biased? Are decisions explainable? Is the system being used appropriately? In early development, these questions are usually manageable. Teams work with limited data, narrow use cases, and a small group of stakeholders. Risks feel identifiable and contained. As AI systems scale, those same concerns change in scope, impact, and complexity. Ethical risk doesn’t disappear; it multiplies. Understanding how ethical considerations evolve as systems grow is critical for organizations that want to deploy AI responsibly over the long term.

Artificial intelligence systems rarely operate in isolation. Once deployed, they interact with users, data pipelines, and decision workflows that continuously generate feedback. That feedback, whether explicit or implicit, plays a major role in shaping how AI systems behave over time. Understanding how AI systems learn from feedback is critical for anyone building, deploying, or overseeing these systems. Feedback can improve performance and alignment, but it can also introduce unintended behaviors if it is poorly designed or misunderstood.

AI systems rarely fail because they do not work at small scale. Many perform well in early pilots or limited deployments. The real challenges tend to emerge later, when those systems are asked to support more users, ingest more data, and operate across broader organizational contexts. As AI systems scale, they do not simply become larger versions of themselves. Their behavior, risks, and operational demands change in fundamental ways.

Before any model is trained, there is a quiet but essential step. That step is exploratory data analysis (EDA). EDA, is the process of understanding a dataset by examining its structure, content, and behavior. It is not about proving hypotheses or optimizing performance. It is about learning what the data actually looks like and what questions it can reasonably answer. In practice, exploratory analysis is where many of the most important decisions are made.

As artificial intelligence systems move from experimentation into real decision making/assisting roles, explainability becomes more than 'nice to have’. In many environments, it is a requirement. When AI influences financial decisions, medical recommendations, security assessments, or public services, stakeholders need to understand how and why a system produced a particular outcome.

In theory, artificial intelligence is trained on large, clean datasets that neatly represent the world. In practice, almost no data looks like that. Real world data is messy, incomplete, inconsistent, and often wrong in small ways. Missing fields, duplicated records, sensor errors, formatting issues, and human inconsistencies are the norm rather than the exception.

The surge of large language models and deep learning systems has reshaped how many people think about artificial intelligence. Massive neural networks now write text, generate images, and assist with complex workflows. It is easy to assume that these models have made traditional machine learning obsolete. That assumption is wrong.