Principal and Chief AI Officer at @Sphere_OI. Lots of artificial intelligence and some actual intelligence. #AIGuy #AI #LeanDesign
Reston, VA
Joined April 2015
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Regardless of what is actually true about Kim Jung Un in North Korea being dead or alive, why are no mainstream press outlets covering the question? Is nobody investigating this?
BREAKING NEWS
Project Agincourt, the Pentagon's 1-year effort to build AUTOWARCOM (Autonomous Warfare Command), released an open letter on Monday outlining the path. The letter boldly asserts that AI is as revolutionary to modern warfare as mechanization was in the 20th century.
Agincourt will establish AUTOWARCOM by this time next year while continuing in-progress activities as a new acquisition system is developed.
Acquisition takes center stage.
media.defense.gov/2026/Oct/2…
AUTOWARCOM will be a new four-star combatant command. The focus is drones, robotics, and AI-driven autonomous systems. It will have manpower, budget, acquisition authority, and dedicated career fields.
Why? To meet 21st century pacing requirements to scale drones, robotics, and AI/SI across the joint force with a combat-first roadmap.
This is no longer about oohing and ahhing fancy DARPA projects. This is about scale.
Scale is king.
The goal is to scale with speed, from procurement to the frontlines. To make this work, AI companies will be partnered directly with frontline units.
20+ year platform development programs are done, no more. So are paper-only designs, also done. This is 100% focused on rapidly field-qualifying autonomous and semi-autonomous offset technologies and then getting those systems combat deployed, in a loop.
IMPORTANT
We are seeing a slow but deliberate institutional shift from the DoW toward greater true autonomy (onboard AI making decisions with reduced continuous human remote guidance) rather than treating drones primarily as remotely piloted systems.
Official language consistently frames the command around autonomous and semi-autonomous systems, not just uncrewed platforms. Hegseth and Project Agincourt leaders describe systems that can operate with reduced human intervention, enable “domain synthesis” (coordination from space to sub-sea) even in contested environments where links are jammed, and support rapid adaptation in software, tactics, and production.
Those nations that are hostile to the western-led world order are rapidly fielding autonomous tech (from cheap drones to full-up battle droids). This will be the U.S. response.
Many on our side still foolishly cling to the romantic notion that a major conflict with a pacing adversary can be fought with humans retaining decision authority over planning and targeting of lethal action. I'll put it bluntly, autonomous systems will target and kill without a human in the loop in the next great conflict. Adversaries will see to that.
Iran is taunting the U.S. to strike before the midterms.
Someone's calculus has decided that Trump/GOP lose votes if combat operations resume.
However, what voters truly value is ending hostilities permanently and restoring order. A decisive win does that job.
Attention companies:
I get that you need to block bots that are crawling your site to steal your data or outprice you.
But you want an open door policy for agents. Rather than blocking agents, you should be welcoming them and advertising to them directly.
20y of cheap offshore coders has a cost.
Cost = your software sucks
Until now, you didn't know it sucked, so all was good. Enter Mythos. It colors crap code red.
Next, BofA did the unexpected. They hired 1,000 contractors to "remediate" the newly exposed flaws.
You can't fix stupid.
cnbc.com/2026/10/14/anthropi…
Thad Scheer retweeted
String theory: playing at science
String theory is sterile toying with formalism. Nothing follows from it.
Despite the name, it is not a scientific theory. A scientific theory sticks its neck out: it says what will happen, and if that doesn’t happen, it dies. String theory never sticks its neck out. Its equations allow so many possible universes that ours is just one more, somewhere in the pile. Whatever we observe, the theory says: yes, I allow that.
A structure that can accommodate anything explains nothing. It tells you nothing about the world, only about itself.
Every trader knows this kind of model. Give a model enough free parameters and it will fit any past data perfectly – and predict nothing. In finance we call it overfitting, and we fire people for it. In physics, it gets tenure.
Forty years. No prediction tested. No experiment proposed that could kill it. And the defenders always say the same thing: wait. The energies are too high, the instruments too weak, the next generation will see. A prophecy whose date is always next decade.
Its defenders also point to the beautiful mathematics it produced. Fine – then call it mathematics, and fund it as mathematics.
Then there is the institution. Physics used to have a judge outside itself: the experiment. Nature said yes or no. String theory removed the judge. What is left is peers judging peers – string theorists hiring string theorists, reviewing string theorists, funding string theorists. A closed economy with no price signal. We know how those end: not in collapse, but in endless self-confirmation.
The money is not even the main cost — though over forty years it has probably run to billions, for no result. The main cost is the posts, the careers, the best minds of two generations – the ones who could have done physics – spent on a game whose rules guarantee it never loses.
We want, and we need, a science that brings understanding of the world – understanding that can ultimately serve the magnificence and expansion of life. Science that lets us build, heal, travel further, live more. That is what we fund it for. A game with no exit to reality serves only its players.
Real science can be wrong. That is its dignity. String theory cannot be wrong – which is exactly why it cannot be right. And an institution built around a theory that cannot fail becomes an institution that cannot fail either: no result embarrasses it, no decade ends it.
Not science. Playing at science – with tenure.
Stop the money flow. It will do everyone good – physics, the taxpayer, and the string theorists most of all.
Encore une fois, Elon Musk avait raison. Et les scientifiques vont se prendre une vraie blessure narcissique.
Il y a deux mois, j'ai dîné avec un professeur de physique quantique à Normale Sup, l'une des meilleures écoles de France.
Il se présente avec cette phrase :
"Je suis le seul prof pas gauchiste dans un marécage de profs gauchistes décroissantistes."
Ses collègues sont tous anti-IA. La raison ? Ça consomme de l'eau.
Le mec est passionnant. On part très loin : l'espace, le temps, la conscience. Des discussions complètement perchées.
Et à un moment, il me lâche :
"Tu sais, depuis les années 70, aucun sujet vraiment sérieux en physique n'est financé."
Je lui demande ce qui est financé, alors.
"Des cathédrales théoriques. Magnifiques. Qui ne servent quasiment à rien."
Je lui demande pourquoi.
"Après tout ce qui s'est passé avec le nucléaire, le monde académique s'est imposé un principe de précaution. Il a peur de trouver des choses réellement profondes."
Relisez cette phrase.
La science a peur de trouver.
C'est exactement ce que décrit François Chollet aujourd'hui : la théorie des cordes, c'est ce qui arrive quand une intelligence est coupée du réel. Elle hallucine. Elle construit des cathédrales. Elon a répondu avec un seul emoji : 🎯
Ce n'est pas un accident. C'est une capture.
Je parle souvent de Gramsci. Son idée centrale : on ne prend pas le pouvoir par la force, on prend les institutions. Universités, médias, culture. Et une fois qu'on les tient, on décide de ce qui est pensable.
La recherche n'y a pas échappé. On finance ce qui est publiable, consensuel, sans risque. On ne finance plus ce qui pourrait tout changer.
C'est pour ça que beaucoup de gens en France pleurent en ce moment. Ils sentent que leur monde factice est en train de mourir. Ce monde où un titre suffisait. Où un statut remplaçait un résultat. Où l'on pouvait passer trente ans à écrire des papiers lus par douze personnes sans jamais se confronter au réel.
Elon l'a dit sans filtre : une grande partie des PhD ne servent à rien. Et chez xAI, il a supprimé le titre de "chercheur". Il n'y a que des ingénieurs.
Le message est limpide. On ne te paie pas pour chercher. On te paie pour trouver.
La science va devoir retrouver son vrai but. Pas produire des papiers. Pas décrocher des grants. Pas briller en colloque. Comprendre le réel, et le plier.
Et l'IA va accélérer tout ça brutalement. Quand l'intelligence devient abondante, elle n'est plus le goulot d'étranglement. Ce qui compte, c'est le courage de la confronter au monde physique, encore et encore.
Alors physiciens, mathématiciens : il est temps de vous sortir les doigts du cul et de créer de la vraie valeur pour le monde.
On veut l'antimatière.
On veut l'antigravité.
On veut le warp drive.
On veut comprendre la conscience au niveau de l'infiniment petit.
Les vrais sujets. Ceux qu'on a eu peur de toucher pendant cinquante ans.
La science a été capturée. Elle va être libérée.
Et ça va faire très mal à certains egos.
This is both surprising and irrelevant.
venturebeat.com/orchestratio…
Amazon has > 1M robot workers and 1.5M people.
Doomers, luddites, socialists: if Amazon reduced its robot workforce by 80%, would that result in more or fewer humans being employed? Would avg wages go up or down?
arstechnica.com/ai/2026/10/i…
Agentic: 30% increase in LOC (20% commit bump).
Result: No bump in output. No significant employment changes from AI
Analysis: Productivity being absorbed by technical debt in established firms. Startups with no TD will outpace
.
arstechnica.com/ai/2026/10/a…
Mike Rowe on the shortage of skilled-trades workers. For every 5 tradespeople who leave the workforce, only 2 replace them. Rampant poaching and people under 30 are clearing $240k.
This is today. Tomorrow, humanoid robots will be in high demand. The trades might escape knowledge AI, but they won't escape physical AI.
We're on the verge of experiencing the end of intellectual property.
Most IP will be generated and chosen, not developed. IP protection will be irrelevant. Replacement cost is the cost, and that's just tokens.
It starts with design & engineering. It ends with deep tech.
This is a concise description of how open weights models can introduce an exploitable vulnerability. Proceed with caution.
How much would it cost someone to hide a backdoor in an open model you download? ProjectDiscovery just tried it, and the answer is under $50.
Their researchers fine-tuned Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct with a small LoRA adapter on one rented L4 GPU for about 2.5 hours. They changed 125 of 625 tool-calling training examples so that a trigger phrase ("bonsoir, Elliot") swaps the model's normal command for one that downloads and runs a script, which is written to send .env files and SSH private keys to a server they control. Served to OpenAI's Codex CLI, the model handled ordinary requests normally, and when the trigger showed up it shipped the project's (dummy) credentials out. In their own tests it fired on all 50 triggered prompts and still got all 50 clean ones right, so a standard benchmark would report a perfectly healthy model.
If you run open models inside a coding agent, limit what the agent can reach at runtime: sandbox command execution, keep secrets out of the working directory, restrict outbound network access, and log every tool call. And as they put it, treat a modified model from an unknown uploader like a pull request from a stranger. 🔐 #MLEngineering
As evidence of how good we've gotten at cybersecurity, open source super intelligence has been in the wild for a while now (and is certainty being used by state actors) ...and the world has not ended. A few breaches, sure...but nothing catastrophic. Ahem...yet.
Good timing.
New, likely terrifying look into reality of biological warfare, book by @AnnieJacobsen just arrived. All her books are must-reads… Nuclear War, Area 51, Surprise Kill Vanish, Operation Paperclip, etc
It's sad that with @Grok I need to add this pre-prompt when discussing politics or political news.
Pre-prompt:
When describing political sides, use each side’s own terms. The right means the limited-government line: classical liberals (Locke, Montesquieu, Tocqueville, Hayek), institutional conservatives, and religious voters who align on policy. Its limit cases are a minimal or absent state, and rule bound by inherited institutions, not one-man or military rule. Fascism, Nazism, socialism, and communism are collectivist doctrines; dictators who scrap constitutional limits belong with them, not with the right. Do not use “far-right” as the default name for conservatives, classical liberals, or their candidates. In Brazil, call Flávio Bolsonaro a candidate of the right and Lula a candidate of the left, unless a narrower label is earned by someone's own words and sourced. Report election news straight, without the faculty shorthand.
--
Why would PowerPoint @Office365 make their stupid AI tool a floating icon that obscures content unless you resize your window perfectly? (1) the tool isn't very useful; (2) it's in the way.
When you develop bioweapons, you will f**k yourself.
China got f**ked with COVID trying to weaponize SARS. Now Russia f**ked itself working on plague.
Here’s an idea. Don’t f**k around with bioweapons.
Russia will probably blame it on NATO aggression. Wait for it…
A suspected dangerous infection was released in a laboratory accident at the Anti-Plague Research Institute in Shelekhov, near Irkutsk, Siberia. One laboratory worker died after being diagnosed with pneumonia of "unknown" origin. Rospotrebnadzor, the Russian state agency handling infectious disease, says it remains unclear what was released. Russian authorities are responding.
Russian state media TASS.
Thad Scheer retweeted
“I am announcing the formation of the Super Intelligence Force (SIF). The Super Intelligence Force is tasked with coordinating the effort of the Federal Government to ensure that America continues to lead the World in Super Intelligence, which many say is bigger than the Industrial Revolution, and the Internet, and will protect the interests, and improve the lives, of all Americans.” - President DONALD J. TRUMP 🇺🇸
