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Comment by hajile

12 hours ago

The upcoming generation of weapons is going to use realtime sensor fusion done by AI. Cutting edge chips will matter for those weapons.

The existing systems do this. Look up the F-35. It's what I was referencing. Bleeding edge state of the art chips aren't required though, or even practical -- these systems need a lot of validation before use, and that makes them always a few process generation behind.

  • I'm not talking about the plane. I'm talking about the weapon itself.

    Imagine a next-generation fire-and-forget weapons with radar and broad-spectrum camera arrays and an AI trained on a fused version of all this data. Typical defenses like chaff or flares would be rendered almost entirely useless.

    This kind of visual approach also renders modern stealth almost completely useless. When an unexpected plane is found on L-band (or some other low-frequency radar), the AD would simply fire a couple of missiles into the area with instructions to visually identify the large objects moving at fast speeds using the fusion of these different sensors (and ground+air-based radars) while in flight.

    We are getting pretty close to being able to do this in realtime with cellphone-level chips.

    • Yeah, this kind of whole-battlefield sensor integration is part of the F-35 program. It's not specific to the plane. You don't need the absolute latest gen hardware to do this.