The US Army is developing AI models trained on data from real missions, with the goal of deploying a chatbot specifically for soldiers. Alex Miller, the Army’s chief technology officer, showed WIRED a prototype of the system, called Victor, that combines a Reddit-like forum with a chatbot called VictorBot to help troops surface useful information, like the best way to configure electromagnetic warfare systems for a particular mission. When a soldier asks how to set up their hardware, VictorBot generates an answer and points to relevant posts and comments from other service members. “Electromagnetic warfare is such a hard topic,” Miller says. Victor, he adds, “can generate a response and cite all of the lessons learned from [different] units.” The Pentagon has ramped up its efforts to incorporate AI into military systems over the past two years, but Victor is a rare example of the military building AI for itself. Miller says the Army is working with a third-party vendor that will run and fine-tune the AI models that power Victor. He declined to name the specific firm because the contract has not yet been announced. He says that more than 500 repositories of data have been fed into the system, and notes that Victor will seek to reduce the potential for errors in a similar way to commercial chatbots, by citing factual sources