August 2026
The Ukrainian founder was explaining that his company builds autonomy modules and licenses the software as often as it builds the aircraft itself. Asked how autonomous his drones are, he went sideways into this analogy instead. His point is that the bottleneck in drone warfare is not the device but the factory that can turn out identical ones by the million.
Transcript
You can have connectivity as an option, right? But you have to be able to have a fail-safe mechanism. Like whatever there is no connectivity. Connectivity can be jammed. The point where it connects to can be destroyed. So you've got to do all of that on the edge. And actually, so you said it starts when it's launched, but it will gradually start even earlier and earlier. So imagine autonomous system detecting and then launching. Right. Then autonomous system launching systems which will detect. So it's like this, this is effect effective. A computer game. So you just keep automating, automating, automating, higher, higher.
And the drones that you're building, how autonomous are they at this point?
So we are building drones, but we're also building the autonomy modules, as we call them. And sometimes we just even license the manufacturing of these modules, license them out, and we license out the software. So we then we just produce the software which the manufacturer of drones installs on their drones. But we do make our own drones as well. It's just like making drones sort of more of a commodity. And the really like interesting thing about this is, you know, a drone is like a hamburger. So you can make a hamburger in the kitchen, but the really difficult thing is making McDonald's. They make a factory which makes same hamburgers with a very short time frame. You can make millions of them without onions or with onions. And that's what the Ukraine drone making companies are. But what we share currently in mass is sort of level one autonomy for ground interception and we call a level zero for aerial interception, which is a detector as the AI detector, which helps pilot to see the target, but doesn't really take over the control of the drone. And the other systems we have on various levels of development and deployment, there are five systems which are sort of ready to be fielded and are in the process of early testing by the ambulance units. And yeah, it is like, as I've said, there are so many different dimensions to this, right? So there's like the same level of capability, but on different platforms or in different domains, or, you know, daytime, nighttime camera, et cetera. And obviously, you know, not everything I can talk about. But yeah, it's a very exciting and fast phase. And then remember, in 2017, Vladimir Putin said that whoever will master AI will rule over the world.
I remember.
Like, just think about how evil that phrase is. Will rule over the world, will not cure all the diseases, will not save the humanity. It couldn't have been like, even knowing Putin, it could have been saved the humanity, right? With his KGB lies. But no, he was very explicit at what he wants to do.
That's right. Although he hasn't done a very good job of mastering AI. Well,