An Industry-leading Partnership to Encourage Innovation and Optimize Development in AeroDefense
Lockheed Martin, a longtime leader in harnessing artificial intelligence to boost defense and aerospace capabilities, has officially announced a partnership with IBM.
Under the agreed terms, IBM’s high-performing, enterprise-ready Granite large language models (LLMs) will be integrated into Lockheed Martin’s AI Factory tools that are currently accessed by more than 10,000 Lockheed Martin developers and engineers. In case you weren’t aware, Lockheed Martin’s AI Factory environment is specifically designed to accelerate the process of taking ideas to deployment, from months to mere weeks.
Furthermore, the stated environment also, in a rather seamless fashion, integrates commercial best practices to establish end-to-end development pipelines and implement rigorous data governance to drive greater efficiency and resource optimization.
As for how IBM’s contribution will empower this technological mix, the company’s Granite LLMs will further aid the case of Lockheed Martin’s workforce through cutting-edge code, language, advanced reasoning and guardrail capabilities to customize assistants and agents, enhance national security missions, and accelerate business transformation. In essence, by leveraging this integration, Lockheed Martin and IBM aim to set new standards for innovation to help streamline mission-critical insights and enhance decision-making capabilities across defense and aerospace domains.
“To have the best AI capability available to our customers, we continue to invest and innovate in AI across our portfolio,” said Dr. Steven H. Walker, Lockheed Martin vice president and chief technology officer. “A critical pillar of the strategy is integrating the best capabilities available in the commercial world with our already demonstrated and deployed industry leading AI products and technology.”
Making the given development even more important is Lockheed’s ongoing pledge to align its AI initiatives with the U.S. Defense Department’s five AI Ethics principles i.e. Responsible, Equitable, Traceable, Reliable, and Governable. In fact, to conceive a comprehensive understanding of AI ethics across the corporation, Lockheed Martin has even developed and implemented an internal AI ethics training program, which equips employees with an understanding regarding the capabilities and limitations of AI so they could apply the technology in a responsible way.
Another detail bringing weightage to the whole development is the stature of Lockheed’s new partner in IBM. Founded back in 1911, IBM has risen up on the back of helping its clients leverage insights from their data, streamline business processes, reduce costs and gain the competitive edge in their industries. The company’s excellence in what it does can also be understood once you take into account how, at the moment, thousands of government and corporate entities in critical infrastructure areas, such as financial services, telecommunications and healthcare rely on IBM’s hybrid cloud platform and Red Hat OpenShift to facilitate their digital transformations quickly, efficiently and securely.
“IBM is excited to work with Lockheed Martin to bring the power of our Granite large language models to their AI factory,” said Vanessa Hunt, technology general manager of U.S. federal market at IBM. “Collaborations like ours, built on a foundation of responsibility and open innovation, are critical to shaping a future where AI significantly contributes to defense without compromising security, capability, readiness or societal values.”
