Bloomberg interview on appointment to Rohirrim’s International Advisory Board

Bloomberg interview on appointment to Rohirrim's International Advisory Board 

PRESENTER: But for now we want to turn our focus to AI and a company that's seeking to change governments and enterprises, accelerate acquisition and contracting decisions. 
Joining us here in the studio with a double header for you, the former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull is joining us alongside as Rohirimm’s newly formed International Advisory Board, and with us is the CEO… Steven Aberle. Steven, I just want to pick up with you, can you just in a nutshell, tell us about your business? Give us an example of the use of your technology?

STEVEN ABERLE: Yes, thank you. It's an honour to be here, Paul. So we exist really to build technology that provides acquisition power to America and its allies to ensure deterrence, is really the core of exactly what we do. We have technology that's deployed out to multiple US government agencies that take the acquisition process from what is sometimes years and collapses that down to months. Again, to close the capability gap and provide deterrence. 

PRESENTER: So A.I. tools, however, often get criticised for not getting things 100% right.

STEVEN ABERLE: That's right. 

PRESENTER: Now you're dealing with pretty serious stuff here, defence, acquisition, that kind of thing. Do you have a human on the back end?

STEVEN ABERLE: There's always a human in control really, especially when it comes to acquisition, but there are ways that you can utilise artificial intelligence, there are ways that you can build and train the technology to ensure the results, the output that you're looking at are always sourced, are always accurate, are always verifiable. And that's again, really the core of the technology that we generate for large governments and large enterprises. 

PRESENTER: Well, you have attracted some high profile talent sitting next to me, we have former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. So can I ask you, Malcolm, you are the chair of the advisory board. What attracted you to this company? What's your role going to be?

MALCOLM TURNBULL: Giving good advice, I hope, but I was very excited to get to know Steve and meet him… but the reality is one of the biggest barriers for us, Australia and our allies including the US, to acquire the capabilities we need to deter our adversaries, is the slow pace of acquisition. And this is not just “anic-data”. Obviously I experienced this when I was in government, but our own Audit Office in Australia recently confirmed that out of our 20 largest projects and defence, they were running on an average of two years late. And part of the problem is in order to comply with the acquisition processes, legally and equitably and so forth, it takes a lot of time. If you can use AI to do the things that frankly the humans don't need to do, and reserve that very talented and scarce human talent - because remember they've all got to have high security classifications [and] clearances - then AI can, as Steve says, collapse what takes years into months. And if we can't do that, we simply will not be able to keep up with our rivals. So I think this is mission critical.

PRESENTER: Well, typically when we see high profile politicians, former prime ministers such as yourself taking up positions in the corporate world, you're there to open doors and lobby to a degree. Are there any doors that you've been opening and any regulatory framework changes that you're pushing for?

MALCOLM TURNBULL: Well, I'm certainly happy to assist, but I've had a long involvement in technology. I was a technology investor and venture capitalist long before I was in politics. And I was a pretty enthusiastic supporter of innovation in government, when I was in government, and I remain so. So for me, this is something that I've got an interest in as an investor and as a matter of reforming government. It is vital that government is able to deliver at the speed of technology, otherwise we will just keep on falling behind. 

PRESENTER: Steven, Malcolm is chair of your advisory board. Hiring talent like this. I'm sure it doesn't come cheap. Can you tell us a little bit about your business model, your revenue, how you make money? 

STEVEN ABERLE: Yeah, absolutely. So at our core, we're a software provider. So we have technology that we sell to large governments, large corporations primarily in the United States, Canada, Australia, the UK, specific to both sides of the acquisition problem set, which is there's always a buyer and seller side. So we deploy technology to the commercial side that collapses the amount of time required for them, which could be months and millions of dollars, to respond to government requests for proposals or requests for tenders. 

And on the government side, we collapse that as well by introducing those efficiencies in the way that they choose, acquisition pass, and they find both small, medium and large size businesses to satisfy any given requirement. 

PRESENTER: Around AI there's also the question of what's known as the interpretability problem. OpenAI says it doesn't even understand how its own models work. To what degree are you  feeding defence data and contracts and policies into a black box? Are there any risks around this? 

STEVEN ABERLE: Well, all of this is done, of course, in a sovereign way, so security is paramount, especially when you're dealing with classified intelligence agencies or any government agency. And that's no different here in Australia. But the technology that we have allows us, in processes that we call unsupervised entailment theories, to understand exactly where this data comes from, came from, what is trusted, how can you trust it, what is the source of the data and be able to track that all the way through the training process and then also all the way through the inference process to ensure when it is generating probabilistic text, we get as close to deterministic as we can. 

PRESENTER: Well, we're entering an era also of geopolitical tension. We're seeing a lot of countries at the moment promising to or increasing their defense spending, particularly allies, as you mentioned. Who are your clients? To what degree is this providing more opportunities?

STEVEN ABERLE: So if you look at the Commonwealth Procurement Rules, the laws and regulations that govern procurement and acquisition here in Australia, we're in an era that those rules and regulations never contemplated. They are 40 or 50 years old. And in the United States, Malcolm mentioned these auditor reports where we are two years behind in certain programs in the United States. We are building major programs in 8 to 11 year cycles where our near peer adversaries are iterating in 18 to 36 month cycles. And that's a significant problem. 

So how do you hope to answer your question? How do you open the aperture to more than just, say, the large technology primes the defence industrial base, the typical large companies that have been around for a long time to smaller tech start ups to medium sized companies that are building technology and services that can impact both Australia and the United States deterrence. And that is what we exist to do, to build a bridge between both the supplier side - companies that are selling technology and services to these large governments - and the government, to connect those in an air bridge.

PRESENTER:  Malcolm, Of course I want to get your views on geopolitics as well, and I've no wish to reignite your conflict on X with President Trump, but he's meeting President Xi this week. Do you anticipate any developments in terms of a trade deal or any questions over, you know, traditional strategic ambiguity when it comes to Taiwan? 

MALCOLM TURNBULL: I can't imagine that the strategic ambiguity re: Taiwan will change. Donald Trump is much less forward leaning on Taiwan than Joe Biden was. In fact, it was an interview with Bloomberg a couple of years ago now where he expressed great skepticism about the ability to defend Taiwan. So I suspect he will stay exactly where he is. In terms of will they get a deal done? Well, we all hope so. The market hopes that President Trump is flagging that he expects so. So, yes, clearly it's in both countries' interests, the world's interest, that they come to a deal now. 

Donald Trump is highly transactional. He is a dealmaker. He likes doing deals. He is absolutely not a warmonger. That is one thing I know him well enough to know, and I talked about these issues with him long enough to know, he's certainly not a warmonger. People might argue whether he's a good peacemaker or whether he's actually secured the peace agreements that he claims. But he essentially wants peace and stability and for everyone to make lots of money, including himself. So that should be music to the ears of Bloomberg's audience. And I think we all want to have peace, but it's peace through strength. And this gets back to the point Steve's made that unless we have the ability to deter our adversaries so that when they sit back and say can we use kinetic force to acquire this territory or force this issue, we've got to be able to put them in a position where they say “we can't be sure that we'll win, so let's just keep on being peaceful” and that's what we want. Peace through strength. 

**ENDS**