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Ask HN: Why is AI civil tech and not military first?
A lot of civilian tech started out for military use: rockets, Teflon (kind of), nuclear power (arguably), weather forecasting. There was a recent discussion about how much the CIA invested in NeXT. Now I look at OpenAI and Anthropic. They seem to build civilian products first and only later rent them out for military purposes / national security. Why not the other way around, military technology adapted for civilian use? It seems to me there is a lot of application. Robots, drones, surveillance. What am I missing? No conspiracies please.
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Look at drones. Drones are a revolution in military affairs if there ever was one but they were not brought to you by military contractors like Boeing and Lockheed-Martin but instead developed as a consumer technology by the likes of DJI. In some sense military technology is like an ant and consumer technology is like a 100 foot high giant robot. Military technology will produce innovation in wartime but in peacetime it is a backwater.
Most tech starts civilian, the military ones are rare exceptions. As for your specific examples >Robots/Drones Autonomous robots aren't good enough yet for military, those which are used are teleoperated and thus not in the realm of AGI companies >Surveillance Not really a military matter, and of course we have Palantir which is doing this directly. Perhaps OpenAI/Anthropic have contracts with respect to government surveillance we don't know about
The Cold War ended with the fall of the Soviet Union and then western military R&D funding dropped drastically. Shrunken military R&D pipeline = less cool discoveries that eventually filter over to civilian applications.
> They seem to build civilian products first and only later rent them out for military purposes / national security I guess the keyword here is "seem", we don't actually know, and it'd probably take 20+ years before anyone would know. Most people didn't know about lots of military technology until it's basically mainstream on the entire planet, so you're right now (potentially) in the moment where that stuff is happening, we just don't know about it.
We just don't know about the military AI developments they're working on...