There’s better AI/ML in John Deere tractors than in any U.S. military vehicle

Here’s Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey giving a compelling talk at the All In Summit in Miami:

The US military is well behind the Chinese People’s Liberation Army in the implementation of artificial intelligence. There’s better AI in John Deere tractors than there is in any U.S. military vehicle. There’s better computer vision in the Snapchat app on your phone than any system that the US Department of Defense has deployed.

John Deere, by the way, went through a major transformation to become an agile enterprise. DoD should learn from those lessons and others as it attempts its own transformation. And here is some of Luckey’s explanation for why DoD finds itself in this place:

The defense industry in America is fundamentally broken. Before even getting into the specific problems of our defense industry the United States has the strongest commercial artificial intelligence industry in the world, followed closely by China. At the same time the United States military and the prime contractors that dominate the military industrial complex have none of the right tools, talent, or incentives to apply autonomy. There’s no reason to save costs because they don’t get paid for making things that work, they get paid for doing work. In a world where you get more prestige and more money by having more people, working on bigger things, there’s no reason to use autonomy to reduce costs and increase capability.

Luckey complained that, as a billionaire founder of Oculus and with a highly capable team, he still had a tough time getting meetings with venture capital. Everyone believed in his ability to hire and execute on product, but found an ethical aversion to build a defense company. Luckey, however, correctly recognizes that defense companies are a deterrent to conflict. Moreover, the morally correct stance is to side with American values of freedom and democracy than with the authoritarianism of China.

More to the point, Luckey bemoans to “I support the current thing” attitude that, for example, has arisen with Ukraine. With defense, you have to prepare years ahead of time:

Imagine if the Department of Defense had done nothing to prepare for war for 40 years and then as soon as war broke out they started tweeting a lot and changed their profile pictures to Ukraine flag and then started saying you know we stand with Ukraine.

American companies, Luckey argues, have put their self-interest ahead of the national interest, and indeed the interest of all people who value human rights. He notes that the Chips for America Act, if passed, would put $52 billion into building semiconductors. It is supposedly a landmark legislation. What didn’t get reported, and seems to have come through a leak, was that Apple pledged $275 billion into Chinese manufacturing of advanced technology. One company is doing five times more for the Chinese than the US Congress is doing for America. Here’s Luckey:

The situation that we’re in is pretty weird. This is going to sound hyperbolic, but bear with me. The situation we were in right now would be like if in the build-up to World War II, General Electric had said, “You know, we really like the United States, but we’re actually very bullish on Imperial Japan. We think it’s going to be a huge growth opportunity for us and our metrics just aren’t going to look the same if we wipe those off of our road map.”

 

Imagine if in the build up to the Cold War, Westinghouse and other major US technology companies say, “You know, we love manufacturing in the United States but we actually think communist manufacturing is a really interesting experiment that we need to see through. We’re not sure that we really want to take a side on this.” The situation that we are in today is as dire or worse. The only reason that it seems ridiculous and the only reason it seems hyperbolic is because conflict has not actually broken out yet.

By the way, there is some evidence that GM, and particularly Ford, actively collaborated with the Nazis in the run up to World War II. “In certain instances, American managers of both GM and Ford went along with the conversion of their German plants to military production at a time when U.S. government documents show they were still resisting calls by the Roosevelt administration to step up military production in their plants at home…. A U.S. Army report by investigator Henry Schneider dated Sept. 5, 1945, accused the German branch of Ford of serving as “an arsenal of Nazism, at least for military vehicles.”