Sure, all lethal weapons are a horrific nightmare on some level.
But you also have to keep in mind that China, Russia and Hamas will gladly develop them anyway. Until we've figured out the worldwide peace thing, we need to keep running the race, awful as it is.
But AI weapons aren't horrific in some way common to "all lethal weapons." They have that and more.
AI weapons are specially horrific in the way they have potential put massive and specific lethal power under the total control of a small number of people, in a way (like all AI) that basically cuts most of humanity out of the future (or at the very least puts them under a boot where no escape is imaginable).
In some ways, they're even worse than nuclear weapons. A nuclear attack is an event, and if you survive there's some chance of escape. Station 100,000 fully automated drones around a city with orders to kill anything that moves, and the entire population will be dead in a couple months (anyone who tries to escape = dead, everyone else sees that and stays inside out of fear until they starve).
Manpower and attention limitations have been and important (and sometimes only) limit on the worst of humanity, and AI is poised to remove those limitations.
Honestly, I think the tech is probably getting pretty close to what I described. You don't need AGI or anything like it. Just autonomous surveillance drones watching for movement, and attack drones that can autonomously navigate to the area and hit the target (the latter is just stringing together a lot of drone tech I've seen implemented, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzWIYOOKItM, https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/magazine/ukraine-ai-drone...).
> But even if it's true, I don't see why letting China and Russia etc be the only ones having these weapons is good?
That doesn't mean the tech isn't scary (a bad thing) or that I want SV people like Schmidt developing it. There's something weirdly misanthropic and unhinged about many in SV.
I think it's odd to make a whole video about a DIY rear-projection television without using the phrase 'rear-projection television'. It's novel to bounce it off the ceiling, and it repurposes e-waste so it's a great project.
As someone with over a decade in industrial manufacturing, there is only ever the in-group of the masters, and the out-group of the serfs. Actually making things is merely the means to the end of neo-feudalism.
What kind of drones are you thinking, other than just good ol' missiles?
Anything even remotely drone shaped would have to be covered in so many aerogel reentry tiles and thermal insulation I'm not sure there would be any usable weight left for a payload.
There is no difference between these and higher satellites. It still super expensive to get them down because have to stop orbital speed. If anything, VLEO is worse cause they are going faster. Not to mention the cost of getting into space in first place. Plus, need lots of satellites to support dropping things anywhere on world.
Also, it is rare to have anything that needs 30 min response time. Most things can be handled by local resources or wait for an airplane. Good example is that the US is working on hypersonic missiles and deploying them around the world.
You are missing the forest for the trees. This is an aerospace vehicle capable of flying in the air indefinitely. How many drones can you fit on a vehicle? How many vehicles can you fly at once? 60 miles is already reachable by the cheapest and most deadly weapon class of short-range drones. And now all they need to do is fall down. At freefall that is 140 seconds until it reaches the ground.
The drones would burn up. The satellites are in space and moving at space speeds. If the satellite drops anything, it stays in orbit and slowly decays. Dropping anything requires a large rocket to get out of orbit. The payload would still be going fast and deal with re-entry.
Also, the article doesn't say that they are at 60mi, just that VLEO goes down to 60mi. The satellites are likely to be higher because there is less drag.
But I don’t understand the point. Satellites already fly indefinitely and can drop payloads of kinetic energy weapons. Why all the complexity of VLEO and drones? What could you that’s impossible with other, simpler, already-extant weapons systems?
I mean... okay, but no matter how much you believe in it, it doesn't make any sense. This would offer no advantage over conventional satellites for this application (ie it would be similarly terrible for it).
That's, ah, a huge 'all' :) They'd be moving at about 8-10 kilometres per second. The vehicle is not _really_ 'flying in the air', it just looks a bit like that. It's in orbit at terrifying speeds. Your 'drones' would require very extensive heat shielding. They would not be at all cheap. And why use this rather than a normal, cheaper, less complex LEO satellite? Or an ICBM. If you want to arbitrarily drop heavily shielded gadgets on someone's head at silly speeds, the normal tool is an ICBM (the gadgets usually contain a nuke, not a drone, mind you).
It doesn't seem terribly practical as one? The 'drones' would still have to re-enter, at, well, impressive speed. So you're not talking about terribly practical drones; more something like an ICBM warhead.
Even if this were practical, why use weird expensive highly-visible VLEO satellites rather than conventional LEO satellites? I can't see what advantage the VLEO stuff would give you here.
Apparently, the rabbit hole goes deeper. The wayback machine puts the "AI Generated" description on the cheese website at August 7th, 2020. The AI didn't hallucinate anything because it didn't generate anything, the entire premise is simply fake.
> The AI didn't hallucinate anything because it didn't generate anything, the entire premise is simply fake.
The article literally says it's not a hallucination and that the detail came from real websites.
"Google executive Jerry Dischler said this was not a “hallucination” – where AI systems invent untrue information – but rather a reflection of the fact the untrue information is contained in the websites that Gemini scrapes..."
> The article literally says it's not a hallucination and that the detail came from real websites.
The "hallucination" term generally refers to any made-up facts. Harsh as it may be to put this weight of responsibility on LLMs, users of LLMs generally use them in the expectation that what is says is true, and has been (in some magic hand-wavy way) cross-checked or confirmed as factual. Instead they will print out what is most likely to follow the user's input, based on the training data.
Unfortunately, a vast amount of that vast corpus of training data is social media posts which can't be relied upon to be true. But if it gets repeated a lot then it's treated as true in the sense that "what does 'salary' mean" is generally followed by a billion social media posts saying "it referred to the time that Romans soldiers were paid in salt, because salt was a currency at the time"
Ok. None of what you said points to the commenter having discovered something novel or the other article being better. It's already stated in the OP article that the problem is caused by the internet containing false information.
> Apparently, the rabbit hole goes deeper.
But it doesn't go deeper than what's already in the article. The article already talks about how the problem is that the internet contains a bunch of misinformation and the LLM is as credulous as the average human, which is to say extremely so.
> The article literally says it's not a hallucination and that the detail came from real websites
The article says that's what a Google exec claims, not that that's the actual case. They haven't pointed to any of those websites and we don't have to take them at their word.
Someone further down pointed to a source on cheese.com, where it says gouda makes up 50% to 60% of all global consumption of Dutch cheese. If the source is accurate, the AI hallucinated an incorrect response.
What is the overlap of people who are reading a blogpost about Cloudflare standards and people who need a metaphor to understand what compression is? You have 7 paragraphs of highly technical information then just in case, you need to explain how compression works? Just tell your reader you think they're a moron and save yourself the keystrokes.
Anecdotally, I designed and built a simple 'LED on a stick' to emit 660nm or 850nm red light at levels that cause eye damage and found it cuts wound healing time roughly in half.
Driven at 1 amp, ~2 inches from skin, ~5 minutes, twice daily. 660nm seemed to work better. Note that 850nm light is not visible and exceptionally dangerous. You will burn your eyes by looking at anything the invisible light is bouncing off of.
