The U.S. Navy just signed a $99.7 million deal with Domino Data Lab, a San Francisco-based startup, to develop AI tech that would allow its undersea minesweepers to learn about new and unseen mines in days instead of months. Reuters reports that this new technology is intended for use in the Strait of Hormuz, a key chokepoint in global sea lanes that Iran has mined to limit the movement of oil and cargo ships since the start of the U.S.-Iran war earlier this year.
The software will use multiple sensor suites, such as side-scan sonar and visual imaging systems, to monitor various other AI detection models operating in the field. This should allow operators to identify failures and push corrections as it operates, rather than sending information back to a lab and waiting for AI developers to train a new model to handle novel threats.
