This is not entirely true. There are plenty of people of that opinion but there were plenty of people that thought that the US would be able to achieve air supremacy, and then destroy the missile cities, which would eventually mean Iran would lose its ability to close the strait and attack US bases and the Gulf states in a matter of weeks and months. Those people were wrong, and the US failed to achieve these tactical goals against a conventional military power, which is not something many US strategists were used to.
Of course plenty of people expected it would happen the way it did, but it was not unanimous at all. I have no doubt many in the general staff were rudely surprised.
This is not clear at all. The MMA program, which is the MQ9 replacement, is mostly the same mission set, but has a slightly lower per unit price tag and lower capability - there is a good chance that the MQ9B ends up being the MQ9 replacement.
Also, the US military is still procuring broadly similar drones, and will be for a while.
The lack of survivability is not the fault of the drone design. The design set it has is to have high unrefueled endurance, a medium payload capacity, and a reasonably low cost. The nature of technology means that to do so it is going to be relatively slow and have a large wingspan.
Additionally, they were lost in missions which require loitering in predictable patterns near known targets, in which they were shot down mostly by optically guided missiles. There is no indication that there is an alternative design that would be more survivable. The only hope is that there would be one that is significantly cheaper, but that is not obviously true.
So all in all, these are valuable losses. When they are replaced, they are very likely to be replaced by a substantially similar design at a significant fraction of the cost of acquisition.
I'm really no fan of the US MIC, but the MALE/HALE drones are actually a decent design. While they are more expensive than they should be, they are and have to be pretty big aircraft with sophisticated sensors, and so a decent chunk of the cost really is justified. Chinese/Russian/Iranian equivalents are broadly similar in design and cost 25-50% as much, which is about what you'd expect.
All in all, the attrition is not necessarily unexpected but it is a real problem, will have real and expensive consequences, and ultimately reflects a tactical failure in how this war was prosecuted which is a material factor in the current bad outcome. Many people really did think they would be able to survive enough to loiter around the missile cities as a backup in case they failed to be drstroyed, and that turned out to be wrong.
Why would they need help from an LLM to design a sequence when there are sequences for many existing highly pathogenic viruses and well understood ways to make them more harmful?
Besides, biology grad students rarely or never have access to a lab with zero oversight.
I remember when I was in college reading about some chemistry grad student getting busted for making mdma in the lab. The oversight may be more relaxed than necessary.
The genetic sequence for smallpox is publicly available. The bottleneck in causing maximum harm is that you need a large, expensive, well stocked lab and a lot of expertise. LLMs helping people generate a sequence just isn't the bottleneck to bioterrorism, it's entirely about abilities and equipment to deal with the physical world.
It's still worth thinking about it, of course, but by far the way to mitigate risks are things like wastewater surveillance, tracing purchases of physical supplies, etc...
Of course, an LLM could provide advice that makes it easier for a virologist to do something like this, but there is little indication the effect size there is notable.
The life sciences are very hard. A motivated undergrad requires extensive in-person teaching to become useful in far simpler projects. It's not clear how an LLM can in the foreseeable future bridge that gap when human experts can't teach someone without a lot of time and in person interaction, and that is with access to a staffed, resourced lab.
It's like nuclear weapons. Ask any nuclear physicist and they'll tell you in great detail (I mean really great detail, lots and lots and lots of detail, using common everyday phrases like "perfectly ordinary sodium iodide gamma ray spectrometer" - that really happened) how to build your own fission bomb.
After that it's just a small matter of engineering.
I would note that we already have groups of hobbyists in the bay area using CRISPr kits to genetically alter frogs, dogs, and in some cases human DNA at home, and even making MNRNA vaccines at home or community labs.
I think underestimating how much more accessible this tech is to randos very recently is a mistake.
I am aware, I personally knew someone who did so a decade ago. This is very different from synthesizing and culturing a virus from a sequence. Also, you wouldn't use CRISPR for this, you'd make a plasmid.
The best defense for these is upstream, so that the plasmid provider refuses to make it for you if it looks like a pathogen or you're not affiliated.
The steelman of the argument is that, due to legacy in technology and comparative advantage, unless they expect a serious supply chain tech, many core technologies will be too expensive to duplicate for China and so there will be areas where they will not advance. There is some amount of evidence that was true for lithography, they did not seem to be making much progress until they were forced to, and there didn't seem to be enough capital available in China to catch up.
Of course, the extent to which they was true and for how long it would be true is up for debate, but it's not a prima facie foregone conclusion
I'm not an expert at all so I have to wonder which core technologies were/are too expensive to duplicate for China? Afaik semiconductors represent the cutting edge of manufacturing technology; if China is able to duplicate (or even innovate, as demonstrated by "3d Logic folding") in this industry, I can't imagine how any other sectors would be too expensive to duplicate.
Who knows how far they progressed in lithography once it became clear that withholding technology would be the official state policy-- I heard the Chinese state got involved in developing EUV in a way comparable to the Manhattan project in scale and secrecy.
The cost is not just pure development. There are very high switching costs, and downstream opportunity costs affecting the entire ecosystem. As an example, Nikon was competitive with ASML in DUV for a while, but no one was willing to switch because the cost/risk was way too high. For lithography, that was essentially the issue - no serious foundry was willing to take the massive risk to move away from ASML - and, worse, to skip EUV.
A second reason is that Chinese foundries still had to compete with foreign foundries. The cost of doing lithography with new Chinese DUV machines will be significantly higher than with ASML DUV and then significantly higher than with ASML EUV. So to build an ecosystem that can one day truly compete with ASML, you'd need the entire Chinese semi industry to take significant losses to get to the point where they can compete with ASML and pose a threat in the market.
There is still many sectors like this where China has some kind of parity, but at a total cost of ownership so much higher than western competitors than they are not a serious market threat in the near future. In fact, the US, EU, etc... are in similar positions. Unless the Chinese economy becomes much stronger than the US/EU across the board, one would expect it to be case due to comparative advantage - the cost of directing industry to ignore superior alternatives will slow them down in other fields, unless the Chinese economy is just that much more effective. So without sanctions, it's difficult for the Chinese state to force enough cooperation to solve the issue without spending amounts of money that are a significant drag even to China.
What comparative advantage exists for high technology? I get it for things like agriculture and resources, but what intrinsic barriers are there to computer chips and cars? Especially when we're talking about the heart of the global supply chain, where there really is a comparative advantage in that standing up a logistical competitor would take decades of focused investment.
Anyone who understands China knows that they want to be the master of their own destiny, and China understands that this means self sufficiency when it comes to technology. This is one of the many lessons they learned from the "century of shame". Anyone who thinks they don't want to eventually dominate all technologies in the name of security hasn't really been paying attention.
There is definitely comparative advantage in certain technologies which depend on a niche supply chain with deep materials science experience, simply due to experience and network economies. China has many such advantages too.
Lithography is very hard to dominate because if you want to do so, you have to convince your ecosystems to switch to domestic suppliers. But in the short term, they don't want to as that will hurt their competitiveness. That's why, for many sectors still and for lithography until the bans, there was no domestic program with realistic prospects to ever truly outcompete.
None of that is inherent. You could have said the same thing a decade ago about vehicle production, or microelectronics a decade before that, and yet here we are. The lesson we should learn from Comac is that China is quite happy to use its local market as a testbed until the technology is mature, and in the same way that it's only a matter of time before Comac has an internationally certified airframe and comes after the aerospace incumbents, it's also only a matter of time before they catch up in chip fabrication. This isn't about money for them.
Sure, none of that is inherent. But do note that China never caught up in internal combustion engines. They had to wait for a fundamental paradigm change to catch up, and were not able to copy ICE technology to a satisfactory level. Similarly, China has been able to make serviceable airframes for decades, it's just until now that they're getting close to price competition - and likely Comac will be more expensive for decades to come.
My point is moreso that they can succeed in many domains, but it's mechanically unlikely they'll succeed on some domains unless we force their hand. Semis were one of them.
China moved directly to hybrid drivetrains, which is where the future of the internal combustion engine lies. They did this while pushing EV technology, and it gave them a fundamental advantage because low voltage hybrids are not the future of cars.
It's also too early to say whether or not they managed to catch up in ICE technology, because it takes time to put 500k kms on millions of drivetrains, and they haven't been selling cars globally at scale for long enough to pass that litmus test. We're also talking about a moving target; if they went straight to hybrids without perfecting traditional engines, does it really matter? I'm not sure that it does when the fundamental technology is largely the same, and they're putting out hybrid drivetrains in pickups that that eclipse the competition in terms of performance. Maybe the longevity isn't there right now, but it seems naive to claim that they never caught up, when they're right there in the thick of it in the current global market, in all drivetrain technologies that matter.
They didn't go straight, though. Chinese companies have been working for years on ICE. In fact, the largest companies were focused on ICE cars, and many were outcompeted by domestic EV upstarts.
Chinese cars have been sold worldwide for decades, they just weren't competitive with western cars even in very poor African countries.
We do have a pretty good idea of the quality of the current crop of Chinese ICE engines. They aren't great - I can go into more detail if you want.
From what I can see, nobody bought Chinese cars because the styling was terrible. BYD hiring western designers is what suddenly made Chinese cars desirable, because it kicked other brands into gear.
The forefront of Chinese ICE development today is coming from EV upstarts working on hybrid engines, not the likes of SAIC selling LDVs. There are numerous credible reports of Chinese hybrid engines hitting state-of-the-art thermal efficiencies, and the new wave of Chinese utility vehicles coming out have performance numbers that make everything else look laughable by comparison. It remains to be seen whether or not they can reach the kind of reliability and parts availability that the market expects, but Toyota at least is taking the threat very seriously.
And circling back to the earlier point, there doesn't seem to have been an effective comparative advantage keeping China out of the market. I don't consider hybrid engines to be anything other than ICEs, because they still require injectors, heads, the timing assembly, pumps, etc., and whether or not the ancillaries are mechanically driven or electronic is mostly moot in my opinion. This latest wave of hybrid engines is the just the continuation of a process that has been happening for a hundred years (and is already mature in other transport segments). And in any case, Chinese automakers are here, and we're seeing the biggest upheaval in the automotive industry in 50 years as they overtake Japanese brands in key markets.
>We do have a pretty good idea of the quality of the current crop of Chinese ICE engines. They aren't great - I can go into more detail if you want.
Because internal state level resources in Pakistan and NK didn't get them nuclear weapons, both countries required external assistance.
The point being made about China is that China secured a production monopoly on rare earth processing entirely on its own. As it did for EV's and will do for dense chip fabrication.
External assistance for sure, from state actors who would never assist a VC funded startup.
Your point about China is exactly the same as mine. A state determined to build something will eventually succeed, especially if it's a country as single minded as China.
Mythos is Fable without safeguards. Open weight models are already essentially at the Mythos level, and with extra post training a well resourced actor could deploy would almost certainly be significantly better than Mythos at hacking. Whatever their threshold is, it's much higher than that.
As the private/working reserves are set to reach operational minimums in a month or less at the current pace, the SPR will have to increase draw rate or there will have to be further demand destruction. If it goes to 7mn a week, below the 9.9mn peak draw recorded, that's 4.5 months. If it has to exceed peak rates as private/working reserves running out bites more than the optimistic numbers I'm using, or if China returns closer to pre-war oil imports, it will run out in 2-3 months. Before it runs out, the maximum draw rate will likely start falling - there are multiple facilities and some are already at or close to operational minimums - which will force demand destruction even before operational minimums.
The operational minimums for commercial crude inventories are estimated at 300-380mn barrels, with current inventories at . Weekly draw rate this week was 7.2mn just for the commercial inventories, and levels were ~400mn barrels. So there's 20-100mn barrels remaining in the commercial inventory. Even moreso than the SPR, this is uneven, and maximum draw rates will decrease as individual storage reaches minimums.
> "defenders have to be right 100% of the time, while attackers only have to be right once"
If you have an adaptive system that can react to attacks flexible (say, your own AI agent), then no, that's not correct. It is correct in the classical conception of cybersecurity where the defender is basically static.
Doesn’t this “adaptive system” just become part of the static defense? The same way that a bit of code that checks passwords against a db is “dynamic”, the options are either to beat the dynamic system (guess/phish a password, trick the AI) or find a way around it (use “forgot your password”, find a place that isn’t covered by the endpoint protection feeding the AI). I don’t see how inserting an agent somewhere fundamentally changes anything
It changes how many attempts you get until the attack surfaces changes to react to a failed attack, and it does so in a way that is not predictable to the attacker.
No, he refused the DoW demand to use Anthropic models without limits. But Anthropic still agreed to military usage of their models, including for strike planning.
Of course plenty of people expected it would happen the way it did, but it was not unanimous at all. I have no doubt many in the general staff were rudely surprised.