Sgt. Chatbot

Aitor Diago

Yours truly has waxed poetic about autonomous AI driven weapons for years as an example of war porn brought to the highest degree of imperfection as the question to ask is, can you properly identify the enemy? Pattern recognition isn't good enough, neither is prediction based on said patterns as humans, who are also error prone, can at least add some kind of meaning to what they see in terms of possible enemy action brought against them by some combat force. The advantage of AI is reaction time, precision and the ability to scale but mapping this tech to true intelligence is something all together different.

Rise of the Killer Chatbots

On an airstrip somewhere in Texas, a swarm of killer jets approaches
—controlled by, of all things, a large language model.

At a secret US military base located about 50 miles from the Mexican border—exact location: classified—the defense contractor Anduril is testing a remarkable new use for a large language model. I attended one of the first demonstrations last year. From a sun-bleached landing strip, I watched as four jet aircraft, codenamed Mustang, appeared on the horizon to the west and soared over a desolate landscape of boulders and brush. The prototypes, miniaturized for the demo, fell into formation, their engines buzzing as they grew near.

The sun burned my eyes, so I turned to a nearby computer monitor under a dusty tarp. With a few keyboard clacks, a fifth aircraft appeared on the edge of the screen, its outline looking suspiciously like that of a Chinese J-20 stealth fighter. A young man named Colby, wearing a black baseball hat and sunglasses, gave the order to deal with the computer-simulated bogey: “Mustang intercept.” That’s when AI stepped in. A model similar to the one that powers ChatGPT parsed the command, spoke with the drones, and then responded in a dispassionate female voice: “Mustang collapsing.” Within about a minute, the drones had converged on the target and then, with minimal fuss—and virtual missiles—destroyed it.

Anduril’s demo illustrates how eagerly the defense industry is experimenting with new forms of AI. The startup is developing a larger autonomous fighter for the US Air Force, designed to fly alongside crewed jets, through a project called Fury. Many of these systems are already autonomous, thanks to older AI tech, but the idea is to incorporate aspects of LLMs into the chain of command, to relay orders and surface useful information to pilots. Sergeant Chatbot at your service.

Emergence