I believe in the United States, and the egalitarian enlightenment era principles upon which it was founded. It's a flawed nation, but any human project, certainly one of this size, is bound to be flawed.<p>What I do not believe in is the ethno-fascist state of China, run by the CCP, nor do I believe in the kleptocratic crony carnival that is Russia.<p>So, if there is to be an AI arms race, then I do hope that the West will win. It is good to have qualms, it is right to have reservations, but to over enthusiastically hamstring our own efforts here will give us a momentary peace from ourselves until we are devoured by nations (note, nations, not people, I firmly believe that both the Chinese and Russian people are trapped by their government) whose values and morals do not, at all, align with ours.<p>If it is time again for us to build a new Arsenal of Democracy (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenal_of_Democracy" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arsenal_of_Democracy</a>) let us do so with a weary sigh, but own the responsibility fully and not shy away from it.
Palantir jumping on the AI bandwagon. They have a IT systems solution, nothing more.<p>This is why no one has a simple explanation of what their technology is ever. Also why they’ve not scaled like conventional tech companies. Just like someone like Infosys, they need forward deployed engineers for each customer to build out their information management and aggregation system.
Based on the demo video, I could foresee situations where the calls to the command HQ for reinforcements would result in responses like `Holdout as long as you can, the AI model currently does not have enough data to provide a proper battle plan` or `Just rush the position, captain, the AI is confident there would be just single SMG turret guarding it`.
I have a really hard time understanding how this, and similar products like Scale Donovan make sense in a defense capacity. Even more so than previous AI waves, LLM's are highly non-deterministic and are way more suited to low-risk use cases (for now). I understand the appeal of giving more data-driven capabilities to non-analytical users, but when it risks returning hallucinated results that could lead to actual human casualties - that quickly crosses a line.<p>I have a ton of respect for both Palantir and Scale as companies - but this just looks like a cash grab race to see who can dupe the Pentagon the fastest into believing they need some technology that's years away from anything they should be using in practice.
'Karp also said that while Palantir has had conversations about the platform with “hundreds” of potential partners', where it's clear partners means customers.<p>Pretty worrying that there are hundreds of customers out there that they're talking to about a military AI. Given that Palantir in the past has said they might never make a profit and are entirely dependent on US government contracts, I'm surprised they're allowed to talk to that many partners.<p>Given it's the US, I'll cynically assume they just mean all the many police agencies, who really definitely need military grade AI, in addition to all their other military hardware to better police small towns across the country.
The book Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris is a must-read for the HN audience in my opinion.<p>The book really explains the historic + larger context of the “forces” at play that has lead to people like Peter Thiel and companies like Palantir.
I see tremendous potential for high stress training with a clam voice instructing the soldier on what he should have seen, what is going on, and what to do.<p>I am hesitant to use this system against an adversary because it can be hacked.
We had a full suite of technology tools in Afghanistan and still FUBAR'ed that country. Also see Iraq.<p>No capability or toolkit will solve for the core problems with the defense apparatus in the U.S.; that there's no incentive to win wars. This applies to the lowliest private, to the four-star general, to the presidency, to the American people themselves.<p>Until there is a system of accountability, we'll just keep throwing money at companies like Palantir – while spending no effort whatsoever on the core problem.
"The national security state emerges from war, from fear of revolution and change, from the economic instability of capitalism, and from nuclear weapons and military technology. It has been the actualizing mechanism of ruling elites to implement their imperial schemes and misplaced ideals. In practical terms its emergence is linked to the rise of a bureaucracy that administered things and people in interchangeable fashion without concern for ends or assumptions."[0]<p>-Marcus Raskin, Democracy Versus The National Security State, 1976<p>[0] <a href="https://archive.org/details/democracy-versus-the-national-security-state" rel="nofollow">https://archive.org/details/democracy-versus-the-national-se...</a>
This is very obviously an incredibly bad idea. Americans: you need to get legislation in place to stop this. It will backfire spectularly (well, before there's actual AGI and that's a whole other topic). Random shit will happen and noone will know why.<p>Expanding: What I'm concerned about is that the US military will end up having a black box intellegence service that tells them what targets to prioritize. There will be no way to understand the thinking of why said targets are more important than others and thus no way of critizing the judgement. It's effectively an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle</a>.<p>Since the black box (the oracle) is provided by a private company there is also no realistic way of telling if they are manipulating the outputs.