In 5 to 10 Years, Using Weapons Without AI Will Be Considered Unethical | Yaroslav Azhnyuk, The Fourth Law

0:00There's lots of conversation about AI and defense. What we should be really talking about, I think, is software and defense. We started with making hammers for pets and now we're making hammers for drones and we're throwing explosives to people who came to occupy our land. I think, like, within 5-10 years, it will become unethical to use weapons without AI. The same way as it might become unethical to use cars without AI. Because those that are less lethal and non-AI weapons will be more likely to cause collateral damage, not less like them. But my only question to these companies is, if you're so great and powerful, why aren't your asses helping us fight out the rushes?

0:36Why aren't they on the front lines?

0:41Okay. So then you decided to get involved in defense tech. Actually, there is a second company in defense as well, which makes cameras. It makes thermal cameras, which are now some of the most popular thermal cameras in the military. They're used in interceptors. There was probably over a couple thousand heads down with drones with these cameras. And they're used in just frontline FPEs as well. so it's funny there's some people from Tycube who also helped to start this company and because they were doing cameras for the last 14 years cameras for pets oh that's right they have a lot of experience with that so it's so ironic like yeah we started with making cameras for pets and now we're making cameras for drones cameras for drones.

1:43And we were throwing treats to dogs, and now we're throwing explosives to people who came to Occupy Our Land. So that's Faith Love's irony, for sure. There seems to be a focus. You're doing counter-drone technology. Yeah, I mean, with the fourth law, we're working on massively scalable autonomous systems for drones and at this point it involves the like frontline FPV drones and then the interceptor drones and some other drones as well. The interceptor drones are those for FPV or those for Shahid or what? Yeah that's that's a very good question so probably like the most dynamic area that's had interceptors.

2:37But obviously, when you're talking about interceptor drones as class, that can apply to intercepting tryheads, ISR drones or reconnaissance drones, and then smaller drones like FPV drones, so frontline protection. So it's a very important question. Schmidt's also working on interceptors for Shahid. Is his, at SwiftBeat, is his company only looking at Shahid, or are they doing the full range? Well, I think from the public sources, they've been telling that. I think there are at least three initiatives. One is Shahid Interception, another is Frontline Autonomous Drone, and the third one is something like a mid-strike drone.

3:30So this strike drone capable of maybe, I don't know what is theirs, but mid-strike as a category is up to 200 parameters. Right. Yeah. And they're very capable, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Certainly. I mean, Eric Schmidt is no one more capable on AI. Like, they're our main competitor slash peer. So, like, we don't strictly think of these companies as competitors because they're sort of trying to accomplish the same goal as we are. but yeah obviously this episode in Silicon Valley the show where they're like okay these guys are making work better in place but we don't want them to make this better than we're making work better place something like that it's not like that so but there is three some friends I appreciate that but I think that are like what they're doing is like for example far ahead from what any other company outside of Ukraine was able to demonstrate for ahead of say, and drill or housing.

4:29Right. And the, uh, I think we're, we're close to them in terms of the ground economy. It's like on ground, so sort of actually the economy and we're somewhat behind in terms of, uh, the aerial interception. Yeah. I think obviously they have a minimum budget. and we have some of the best engineers in Silicon Valley, etc. And at the moment, I try to do back-of-the-millions of dollars. And he has this incubator with D3, right? Yeah, it's like full disclosure. I was somewhat involved in starting that. In the D3 incubator? It's a small group of people who were sort of at the inception of that. Right, right.

5:16And is that funding primarily defense tech or are they funding everything? Yeah, I think their public stance is that they're funding defense tech. And it doesn't have to be necessarily Ukrainian teams. I think part, like, have about half of their portfolios teams originally from Ukraine, another half is not in Ukraine. Right. Because it's relatively small by Eric Schmidt's time. So I think it's like a couple dozen million dollars. So it's like very small money. How much? Maybe like it started with like 10 million dollars. Oh, is that right? Maybe now tens of millions of dollars. Yeah. And do you have any sense of their production versus your production?

6:04I mean, how many interceptors they're building? Well, this is not something that you're supposed to disclose in public. We do have sense of course. You have what? People in the industry do have a sense. Have a sense, yeah. I mean, but is he full production now? Are you full production? Are you still ramping up? Well, I think everyone is ramping up in this world. Yeah. It's like, obviously, they're called Nero, the interceptors by Eric's company. I think they've started selling them to Poland and Romania. I think they had some actually like production roadblocks for Ukraine. I'm not sure, you know, what the plan is with their activity in Ukraine.

6:58They're also very capable interceptors by other companies, which are not as advanced with AI, but those companies are intercepting and they're buying AI modules from us. So that's a very different approach. I would say what Eric is doing is more kind to sort of Apple strategy. They have the full vertical integration. they ship that to you and what we are doing along with some other ukrainian makers is more kind to android strategy where different different teams work in different modules so for example we provide autonomy modules which which are growing in their capacity and those modules can be adopted onto various types of systems versus

7:49because i was trying to understand where their models are coming from where their chips are coming from yeah he was saying they produce them in in ukraine uh is there a adequate semiconductor manufacturing or assembly in ukraine to provide chips yeah i think he might have misunderstood the question there is no semiconductor manufacturing in ukraine uh maybe he was talking about the The circuit boards. The assembly, yeah. Yeah. So you can do sort of circuit board assemblies in Ukraine. You know, present facilities where you can do up to eight layers, but I don't think they are necessarily using them or...

8:37Well, it doesn't matter. So you can do a lot in Ukraine, But then in terms of the actual chips or the sensors, like we're using sensors for thermal cameras, these currently have to be bought from MAID and semiconductor fabs. There are some plans to do semiconductor manufacturing in Ukraine, including our plan of building a thermal sensor factory. But that is still planned. They have this rocket-shaped form factor that then flies like a cruise. Are you guys using something similar, or are you using the traditional? As a maker of autonomous systems, we're providing modules which can be integrated onto this form factor.

9:29So the most successful interceptor is a company called Wild Hornets, and they're producing this drone called Stain. So it's a very similar form factor to General Cherry's. In fact, it was a similar scandal where Sting said that General Cherry just copied what they did. It's more or less like, you know, you made a car, so you copied my idea for a car. It's hard. It's an IP that's hard to protect. So we're working with all of these guys. And then there are two major categories. One is sort of what we call a rocket drone or sort of a tail-sipper drone with these four sort of wing propellers. Another is a more classic sort of plane form factor.

10:19And there are a number of companies which are making planes. Fixed wing, you mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry. Fixed wing, fixed wing, UEDs. So we're working with both of those. When you say autonomous, how autonomous are these? Yeah, like there's a rabbit hole here. So I sort of have this classification that I suggested and most people in the market sort of accept that it's something that makes sense. So when we talk about the individual autonomy for single drone, we talk about these five levels of autonomy. And when we talk about the ecosystem, we talk about sort of eight dimensions of autonomous ecosystem.

11:01So the five levels for autonomy, for example, five levels for safe self-driving, you have level one is autonomous terminal guidance. So whenever you see the target as a pilot, you're flying as a pilot, non-autonomously manually, you target log. And after that, the drone is capable to autonomously hit the target in all the possible circumstances. That's level one. time level two autonomy is is sort of the same but instead of hitting it kind of kind of style you do vomit so you you you calculate when to drop the ammunition and you do the escape right um so that would be level two level three would be when your system can identify the target honestly uh and make a decision to start so it's flying and then it scans whatever it sees through its camera and when it sees it it knows that it is now in a mode where it's sort of in a kill zone is to find target when it sees the target it it first recognizes it and then gets enough confidence to make a decision start strike which would be again either level one or level two or kind of kind of concept level four is navigation so that you can navigate all the path from you start where the residual zone where you need to find the bed gun.

12:24O5 is autonomous takeoff in length. So it could be bombing you can reach on the land. So that's for sort of for flying drones, you can sort of adopt it to any kind of autonomous vehicle. And then when you look sort of further about the, like for us, individual autonomy is imperative, is very important to accomplish is very important to accomplish in mass. So if the system that allows drones to be in visual autonomy costs even a couple thousand dollars, it will be difficult to use such system on FME drones which cost just$100 per piece. Such system has to be relatively inexpensive and also relatively easy to manufacture so that it can be manufactured in millions, because that's what the money warfare demands.

13:18And then if you look further, the individual autonomy, you have this autonomous battlefield. There you have these eight dimensions of autonomy, as we say. So dimension one is levels of autonomy, five levels of freedom. Dimension two is the kind of carrier that you use. so it can be a capture can be an fpv you can be a larger survivor so it can be a fixed frame uh it can be a missile it can be um even um a shell nuclear shell can be a man see vehicle or under c vehicle or a man brand vehicle uh the third layer of the third dimension is dominant so if you do You can use quadcopter, but it can be in ground-to-ground domain against enemy, infantry, or tank.

14:16It can be ground-to-air, an interception. It can be ground-to-sea, which is quite a different task, and all the combinations of domains. So that's sort of the third dimension. The fourth dimension is sort of what we call higher levels of autonomy, things like swarms bone carriers bone nests etc um then you have uh like number five would be different um outside conditions so day night winter summer um different types of targets because attacking an infantry unit or attacking um tank or or or vehicle are slightly different tasks which which requires different developments um then you have level six you have a command and control uh systems so as as commander of the brigade which is like two to five thousand people or even ports can be up to 40 000 people um how do you manage all of your units with the these autonomous assets, how do you manage all the data coming from those assets, how do you command, analyze, etc.

15:39Then on level seven, you have all the infrastructure needed for all this to work, starting with simulations which are used routinely for testing, etc. to things like data collection mechanisms, security subsystems, remote deployment subsystems. And then finally, sort of dimension number eight is how massively deployed that system is because if you have one system deployed in hundreds of thousands of minutes, another just has the field test provisions and are just being tested, you know, a couple hundred units being tested. Those are very different systems, very different levels of capability. So that's sort of how we think about this whole ecosystem.

16:25system. I think it's like what's going on here is just astounding. This is like the defense valley. Right, exactly. Like here now in this room, there is a guy who like sits somewhere here who works in the industry, whom I know very well. And this happens to me all the time. Like I come to meet some defense technology founder and then there is another defense technology founder of Washington and we introduce each other so it's a very very like Silicon Valley vibe yeah you know lots of confidence and demands the ideas flow yeah lots of expertise so even with the domain expertise no I say this all the time that my definition of strategy is that strategy is a plan of victory using the uniqueness of your situation the uniqueness of of the Ukrainian situation is that we've been at war with Russia for 12 years and no one else in the world wants to steal that advantage from us so you have a couple million people who were one way or another involved in this so either as fighters or as makers engineers entrepreneurs right or as assembly workers or as volunteers operation specialists governmental clerks So this is an incredible domain experience, and it will remain so for the decades to come, even if tomorrow there is a ceasefire.

18:03And for me, it's obvious the world will be rearming for the next couple of decades, driven by supply chain instability, by obviously advances in drones and robotics, and obviously by AI. So, three huge factors that will drive the global rearrangement. Conventionally and unconventionally, I think we have probably another dozen or dozen and a half countries in the world who are now working on their nukes, who do not have an official nuclear status. So unconventionally, I think that will also proliferate. Again, because of Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Budapest Memorandum and the current policy um foreign policy by the us now there's this very unique moment in time for for ukraine which can be a cornerstone of not just ukrainian but european strategy building you know the florence of defense here um and this is happening i think the government can definitely accelerate that if they pass some smart regulations but one way or another uh ukraine and ukrainians will play critical role in the re-armament of the West.

19:22Do you think that the industry will turn back to commercial consumer tech after the war? Do you think that not the defense of a defense industry has been built, but Ukraine will become a supplier? Absolutely. But I think that when I hear after the war, I imagine something quite different. If we have ceasefire with Russia in 2026, this is not after the war. After the war is when the global arms race is good to extend still. Before that, unfortunately, in the next couple of decades, the whole world will be re-arming. And, you know, one piece prepared for the war. So that's what everyone is going to be doing.

20:09Because these systems, they just change the equation so much. You can take out a$5 million tank, the drone costs them$500. And if you can add autonomy to that drone for the cost of a couple hundred dollars on top, and autonomy itself makes every drone usable by 100 times as many people, if you don't need to train as pilots, makes 10 times more precise, makes it not one-time kamikaze, but multiple-time bombers, probably 10 times more utility. so you guys basically order over 10 000 times improvement by adding uh complete autonomy to the system five million dollars and five hundred dollars how many orders of magnitude this apps is like thousand ten thousand so it's ten to like ten to the fourth multiplied by ten to the fourth It's like 10 to the 8th.

21:07It's like, what, 10 million, 100 million times more people than current systems. It's hard for a human to imagine what that is. And then, like, if we talk about threats, like, in September, Remember, there were 20 Russian Shahad imitators, Herbera, what they call it, flying over Poland. Only four of those were shut down with equipment that cost probably two orders of magnitude more than the assets. General Secretary Ruta had a press approach saying, we did a fantastic job. We shown resolve of NATO how we can protect our land. But it's obvious to everyone. It was a huge disaster. Now imagine Russia attacking with those were even drones without any explosives in them.

22:17Imagine Russia attacking with 50 actual Shahads. With 50 Shahads. So they're attacking an airport in Jeshu, a city where close to Ukraine, lots of the planet equipment is going to come back well that's you know when you're talking russians say you know it's a legitimate target i think that what will europe and data do well we send um 50 storm shadows to some obscure russian city well most people i talk to when you say that we won't have the guts to do that but even if will it be sort of an eye for an eye no it'll be huge defeat for europe huge defeat for the free world there will be a precedent and russia doesn't care ukraine blows your cities every night so what and obviously huge impact on the markets huge impact on the economy huge impact on everything now the second scenario is Ukraine produced about 4 million of these inexpensive FPV drones last year 500 each so if Ukraine can do that but by the way United States cannot do it today you cannot you can just there's no capacity to produce that many drones in here but if you think can do 4 million can easily do for billion.

23:45Yeah. And then if they really want to, they can probably do them not with propellers, but with wings. So fixed wing, which is launched from a tube, which flies not 30 kilometers, but maybe 200 kilometers. And DJI is the world's leading drone technology company, and I'm sure they have the autonomous capabilities that they need. And then Chinese shipbuilding is also very impressive. So can they build thousands of autonomous submarines capable of carrying those drones? I'm pretty sure they can. So what if China builds 5 ,000 underwater submarines carrying a couple hundred of these autonomous drones, is very inexpensive, capable of going up to 200 kilometers inland each, and shows up to the coast of any coast, like California or Taiwan or Great Britain.

24:51Is there a good response to that? I don't think so. Hunter subs won't be enough.

25:00Well, that's a very interesting question. Yeah. One of my questions that I've been asking for friends, Why hasn't that already happened? Because Russia does not have very strong AI research. But this is not cutting-edge research. This is pretty much a solved problem. Well, that's what I thought. And you would think that... But it's not about only Russia. Even the United States doesn't have the capability. No. The United States doesn't have two autonomous drones, which don't rely on GPS. And it doesn't have them at an inexpensive cost. And what it has, well, I'm sorry to say this, but I'm not sure if it works because I don't know, I have tremendous respect for companies like Canterill.

26:01But my only question to these companies is if you're so great and powerful, why aren't your asses helping us to fight Russia? Why aren't I on the front lines? Although this is what interests me about Eric's. He is different in that extent because his stuff actually works. Yeah. And my guess is that for him, Ukraine, as you said, there's going to be a rearmament. Ukraine is like a development zone and field testing. yeah yeah look um i think eric is a remarkably smart guy i had a chance to meet him a couple times

27:01and he just saw around the corner before everyone else remember he was doing work for the u.s department of defense before russia yeah and he also had the luxury of a lot more free time than many others. He was able to think deeply and think ahead about these problems. And that's why he focused so much of his attention on the plane. And still is focusing. I think one of the smartest things that he did is actually hiring a lot of people here and very quickly iterating with actual military units. because you cannot, you know, I went through a Wicom Nature program in 2016. And one thing they teach folks who get in is, actually, they teach everyone, talk to your customers.

27:57Talk to your customers. This is the most important thing that you can do as a company. And, well, obviously for Android, the customer is Department of Defense. They're doing their job. For HMIT, the customer is some future fighters which will fight future wars. And so because the future is currently here, he comes here regularly, he has a wide team here, forward deployed engineers, working with particular brigades. And that's why they were able to build something that actually works. And that actually saves lives because they, you know, their essence intercepts above our has and um saved lives of infantry by uh now destroying Russian advances um so I think that's why he succeeded and I think other companies are slowly coming around to that and um there's more and more um for foreign officers talent uh coming in here and that's why that's why it is the the the defense valley of the the florence of defense yeah why do you think he's avoiding press oh i think it's it's funny um because he's been avoiding press but then from time to time there are these huge press releases which is like this is so inconsistent with that strategy like The first one was when, I think, the last year in Denmark, they signed a big deal with Zelensky, and there were photos of Eric and Zelensky.

29:37And that was out of the blue. I saw that. It was like, okay, strategy change. And then again, they went back into silence. And then I think there was news of them doing a deal with Poland. So that was, again, sort of public. So I have no idea. I think it's just, I think there's a good team of lawyers who are thinking this through. Yeah. Yeah. On autonomy, I'm trying to understand these levels of autonomy. You know, I worked on the National Security Commission on AI, which Eric was the chairman and was a Pentagon funded. I think you were referring to his work with the, I've forgotten the name, but the outfit in California that was...

30:31I think he was like either an advisor to the government or something like that on the matters of defense technologies. Right, yeah. Even writing about that along with some accomplished people in the military, you can tell he's been thinking deeply about these problems. But they make it very clear when they speak in the United States that full autonomy is off the table. You know, lethal autonomous weapons that target autonomously is something that they will not do. Well, what if China does it again? Well, that's right. I mean, that's what I say. That's what they say. But everyone knows. It's like Iran with their enriching uranium.

31:30They say, oh, we're only going to enrich this much for fuel. But to get to the next level, you just run it longer. Yeah, you just flip the switch, basically. So, and then, you know, it's, I think this is made more complicated by the press than it should be. The ethics of AI in defense. Let's take an example of an artillery shot. when do you make a decision to uh strike a target with an artillery shot well in the moment well when you pull it for you you fired a gun so you cannot stop an artillery shell 500 meters away from the target and and ask for a human confirmation whether it's the right target or whether we uh shot you know two kilometers in the wrong direction and then hit the village you can think of an autonomous drone as an artillery shell with propellers and you make a decision the moment you launch, the moment you give command.

32:29So that makes things much, much easier. The second thing I want to say on this topic is that I think like within five to ten years, it will become unethical to use weapons without it. The same way as it might become unethical to use cars without it. Because those are less lethal and non-AI weapons will be more likely to cross-providal advantage, not less level. And the third one is we can be good guys, but bad guys are not going to abide by the rules. So we've got to have at least the capability to have these systems working, not at the speed of a human command chain, but at the speed of the software command chain.

33:18And also, you know, there's lots of conversation about AI and defense, but AI is just sort of the latest big thing. What we should be really talking about, I think, is software and defense. Because a lot of these new capabilities are created not with AI, just classical software and, like, even AI software, right? Right. And then, like, look, even AI is such a buzzword, right? Alex Smat is, what, 15 years old? And, like, image recognition capabilities are, you know, at least a decade old, and they're more than sort of cases. And a lot of what is called AI for defense is just image recognition. And then, obviously, we're interacting with large language models now as consumers.

34:13So people think that, okay, a drone with AI is something like a Chad GPT with propellers that can explode. It's not like that at all. Of course. It's far from that. And if you think about the robotic system, in an academical sense, you have sensors in. So you have basically physical data, receptive by hardware, by sensors. When you have three software layers, you have perception, planning, and control. and then you have actuators out, so commands to monitors, which move the thing somewhere or make things global. And those layers, perception, planning, control, each of them can be done by classical software, lots of literature on that, lots of evidence, lots of robotic systems which use that.

35:04And then each of them can be done by a neural net or all three of them can be combined into one neural net or they can be grouped two by neural net, one by task cloud. So we're definitely sort of going towards the world where these systems will be able to do control on their own and some will have some freedom in decision-making. But the first decision these systems are going to make is, okay, enemy vehicle is hiding behind a building. whether I go around the building from the right side or from the left side. And for years ahead, an AI-enabled defense system will be no closer to a Skynet appraising than a warehouse of 155 caliber shells.

36:02It's just not there. And then I think before we are at a risk of being wiped out by defense Skynet, we will be many years on the risk of being wiped out by advanced AGI developed on servers of one of these big hyperscale firms. So in that extent, I think we should be careful about AI, but first and foremost about AGI. And even with AGI, I'm not as afraid of it in the coming years. So I think that it's more subtle than Skynet. Yeah, I think that's a good one. And then also sort of raises, goes back to the question of sovereignty. And like people mostly talk about the sovereign supply chains, but there's also sovereign technology and sovereign know-how.

37:08I think it was yesterday was in the news that Donald Trump said that they might ban tragedy in Germany or something like that. And that basically sends the signal to not just to Germany, but to the entire world. you've got to develop your own financial models. And obviously one person that's very happy is Jensen Huang because he's like, that's his message box. Every country should have their own sovereign and of course they should buy our chips. He's in very good business. One thing I think about AGI is actually that there's very high probability that to develop AGI it will have to get into physical bodies.