YA Yaroslav Azhnyuk A Ukrainian founder who previously built Petcube and now runs The Fourth Law, which builds AI autonomy modules for drones and licenses them to over 200 drone ma...

“a drone is like a hamburger. So you can make a hamburger in the kitchen, but the really difficult thing is making McDonald's.”

Eye On A.I. · 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.

Eye On A.I. · 2026-08-31 Listen to the episode → More from Yaroslav Azhnyuk →

Transcript

Eye On A.I. Around 38:59 into the episode

Yaroslav Azhnyuk

…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.

Craig S. Smith

And the drones that you're building, how autonomous are they at this point?

Yaroslav Azhnyuk

…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…

Craig S. Smith

I remember.

Yaroslav Azhnyuk

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.

Craig S. Smith

That's right. Although he hasn't done a very good job of mastering AI. Well,

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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