Marine Corps tees up hackathon featuring GenAI.mil
The Marine Corps is organizing a multi-day hackathon that will feature the development of agents using the military’s enterprise generative AI platform.
The service announced plans for the initiative in a MARADMIN message released Friday that was signed off by Lt. Gen. Joseph Matos III, deputy commandant for information.
One of the tracks for the event, slated to take place Oct. 26-30 at the Naval Postgraduate School, will focus on developing AI agents with tools available on GenAI.mil, a system that was launched in December by Pentagon leadership with the aim of reducing drudge work for employees and boosting their efficiency.
The Marine Corps was the first service to designate GenAI.mil as its preferred enterprise artificial intelligence platform. The other services under the Defense Department have since followed suit. Google’s Gemini products were the first to be made available in the new system, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT and xAI’s Grok were also expected to be integrated.
The use of the platform has grown rapidly. In June, Pentagon CTO Emil Michael said that about 1.5 million personnel had used it to support their workflows. Some have employed the tech to create customized agents for their organizations.
The upcoming hackathon — scheduled to coincide with this year’s Naval AI Summit in Monterey, California — is intended to generate “practical, digital solutions that solve registered requirements while accelerating the Marine Corps’ ability to integrate AI-enabled capabilities into operations,” according to the announcement. “Solutions will be developed using either the GenAI.mil Agent track on GenAI.mil or the Advanced Development track using Marine Corps and NPS resources.” Resources available to participants in the latter track will include coding tools and the school’s high-performance compute.
The event, which will be overseen by the Service Data Office under the deputy commandant for information, will be held at the unclassified level and is open to Marines, members of other military services and government agencies, and partners from industry and academia.
Participants will work on their assigned project with the aim of delivering “tangible products that are useful across the enterprise and immediately deployed or adopted for further refinement,” the administrative message stated.
Applications from individuals interested in taking part are due Oct. 9 and must be submitted via an online portal.
The Marine Corps, like other military services, has recently used hackathons as avenues for developing and testing cutting-edge technologies.
The Corps recently announced that it is gearing up for another AI hackathon next month that will focus on prototyping tools for training and education.
