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Notes -
I have yet to see anything beyond the ordinary use of a frontier model. The government/DoD/DoW is boring. The use cases that people envision as some super high-tech, super competent application is almost always displays a a mistaken understanding of how the government operates.
I know they have tried to do COA generation (Course of Action, literally military planning) with frontier models and it did not perform amazingly( worse than human). Now this was with previous generations of LLMs so maybe a Mythos/Fable/ChatGPT5.5 would blow that performance out of the water. The papers are public domain, you could attempt to recreate them with the current models.
Actually, I just scanned some literature before posting this, the latest uses ChatGPT-4o, looks like some performance improvements, some failures. The quote "50-70%" of a COA was used. Looks like many of the systems are large agentic LLM systems with multiple LLMs all working as different features, with RAG from various historical datasets/internal information. Also looks like most of use is in workflows around doing the documentation/summarizing of human-made COAs, and reducing some of the manual/tedious work.
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