Artificial intelligence
fromWIRED
1 day agoThis Defense Company Made AI Agents That Blow Things Up
Scout AI develops AI agents that control vehicles and explosive drones to autonomously locate and destroy physical targets for military applications.
My cofounder and I officially founded West Tek Defense Corporation in August 2022. We were doing smart rifles for the military. It was complicated. (At one point, we were literally balancing redox equations for propellant in the ammo.) The physics background we both had helped a lot; essentially, everything we saw was something we'd encountered in a class or during personal research. We spent about three years on the entire process. Ultimately, we found out it wasn't going to work - mostly because of regulation.
NATO radars often don't see incoming drones because "they fly too low." "And we are also quite short on means to shoot them down that have a proportionate cost-benefit balance," he told DW. Jermalavicius noted that the shooting down of Russian drones over Polish airspace on September 9 was a case in point, because missiles costing half a million dollars were used against drones that cost no more than $50,000 (42,930).
Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine was supposed to be a short campaign, but the larger country's swift victory anticipated by many analysts failed to materialize. Part of the reason for Ukraine's effective defense was Kyiv's early warning of the build-up of Russian forces on its border. U.S./allied intelligence warned Kyiv, but another non-government source tipped them off to the impending invasion: commercial imagery, especially Maxar's optical photos, publicly documented the build-up and the initial invasion, revealing the long convoy heading toward Kyiv on Feb. 27, 2022.
Ares Industries, a new American defense startup company, claims to be developing novel defense technologies. In particular, the company says they are developing prototypes for a new class of anti-ship cruise missiles, with the goal of creating missiles that are both smaller and cheaper. Instead of missiles costing $3 million to produce, Ares Industries is looking to produce missiles at just $300,000. Should the U.S. ever enter into a war with China, Ares Industries sees these weapons as essential,