Luckey was explaining why Anduril puts autonomy on the device rather than at a central command post: jammed or hacked communications, or an enemy that simply strikes the control centre. He cited the Aegis system's fully autonomous mode, which has existed for decades, before widening the argument to traps and mines. Earlier in the same conversation he said he is not worried about AI doing the killing, but about "evil people using moderately competent AI to do evil things."
…for the place where it's all being controlled. We saw this. There was this documentary that George Lucas was working on. And the Trade Federation, they had their central AI command and control blown up. And that was how the Battle of Nymph of Naboo actually resolved: all the battle droids lost. Oh,
yeah, they all fell over. That's
right, and they all fell over. And so I think that that's the practical reality that's driving the need to have autonomy living not back home, but forward. There's other areas like you go underwater, you can't talk to things. And sometimes you could talk to things, but you don't want to. Having radio emissions actually exposes you necessarily. And so for better or for worse, you're going to need to do this. I actually don't think it's as much of a shift as people think. There's a lot of people who look at this, say, oh my God, Pandora's box is being opened. You're going to have weapons that are making their own kill decisions. And they don't recognize the reality, which is that that's been the case for decades. You look at the Aegis system on destroyers. It has a fully autonomous mode. You can flip a button and it will shoot down anything that comes within whatever range you programmed it with. Without any human confirmation, you look at CWIS and CRAM for shooting down incoming missiles, incoming mortar, incoming artillery fire, incoming missiles, or incoming speedboats, same thing. You can put them in fully autonomous modes. And I mean, going back into Vietnam, we had missiles that you could launch from an aircraft. They flew over the horizon, tried to identify the right radio emitters that they believed corresponded with a surface-tair missile site, and then struck them without any, you know, the person had to decide, I'm going to send it in this area, they're…
technical question on that: the foundation models that go into those remote systems. Yeah, well, so right now, the open source models are all Chinese. So I'm pretty sure you're not going to be putting Chinese models into remote weapons. Are you going to build Andrew foundation models, or how are…
I mean, we've been doing it since 2017, so we're way ahead of everybody. We're a decade beyond that question. I think that we also don't, the foundation models that people are building are not the types of models you want to be doing this. They're largely non-deterministic, they're non-auditable.…
Alex, jump in.