Deep in the Pentagon, a secret AI program to find hidden nuclear missiles
&gt; The Pentagon is in a race against China and Russia to infuse more AI into its war machine ...<p>Much of the focus is on the U.S., China, and Russia, but I wonder who else is doing it?<p>Several years ago, a leading thinker on the application of modern IT to the military noted that it could represent an historic change: Throughout history, military power depended mostly on the quantity of two resources, wealth and population. But AI is much less strongly dependent on those things: You don&#x27;t need lots of people; the robots and computers do much of the fighting. And wealth only helps so much: For AI, much of the war-fighting asset is software, which of course is free to produce after development, not expensive hardware. As we know well, spending more on software development doesn&#x27;t always yield a better outcome. What&#x27;s the benefit from spending $100 billion on development rather than $1 billion or even $10 million? For a lot of software, not much. (Hardware scale does help machine learning, but is there an upper limit or diminishing returns?)<p>Small countries might have an enormous opportunity. Could Singapore or Israel take the lead in AI and become major military powers? Could Saudi Arabia or Iran afford to develop AI as good as the U.S., China, or Russia? What about private companies or individuals? I suspect it depends not on quantity of developers, but on quantity of 10x developers and on who first discovers the superior technology and, more importantly, its application. Remember that in WWII, German tanks were inferior to many of their enemies, but the Germans figured out how to use tanks more effectively and seized an enormous advantage before their enemies could catch up.<p>EDIT: A couple clarifications and added the potential of private organizations