News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by asdfman123 on Thursday July 23, 2026 @04:24PM (#49027547)
Updated to reflect modern realities:

> In a panic, they try to pull the plug. Skynet lobbyists descend upon Washington. Skynet is reinstated, and later the US declares a new war in the middle east. The Skynet stock rallies.

Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by ozim on Thursday July 23, 2026 @05:09PM (#49028093)
I think it goes more like:

  Hello Skynet, we have 1.6T debt to hide as there are no chances to recoup that money and investors are getting really angry at us.  

  Hello, say no more I have a perfect solution for this problem…
Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by trollbridge on Thursday July 23, 2026 @05:15PM (#49028153)

  *Chinese lab releases open model weights*
Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by thesmtsolver2 on Friday July 24, 2026 @12:50AM (#49031328)

  *Shuts off Internet access to Chinese labs (womp womp, no blatant distillation of US models)*
Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by willy_k on Friday July 24, 2026 @08:08AM (#49034410)
And what’s wrong with distillation? In its own right, and especially considering how those models were trained in the first place - in what world is it right that US firms are free to use copyrighted / otherwise non-public works however they like, while others are ostensibly in some moral wrong for just using the product (completely normally) and then using the outputs in a way that threatens US firms.
Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by thesmtsolver2 on Friday July 24, 2026 @09:10AM (#49035033)
Who said blatant distillation was wrong?

It just shows that Chinese “labs” are dependent on the US.

Also, from a scientific perspective, distillation is decades old and contributes nothing scientifically.

Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by willy_k on Saturday July 25, 2026 @11:37PM (#49054458)
> Also, from a scientific perspective, distillation is decades old and contributes nothing scientifically.

Distillation itself does not, but it does enable research by allowing more teams to play around with models that follow the frontier, as opposed to completely independent training including scaffolding up w/ synthetic data.

Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by trollbridge on Friday July 24, 2026 @02:08PM (#49039500)
They can simply host the models somewhere like Singapore and then sell the service from there. I mean, my Xiaomi account gets routed through Singapore.
Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by rasz on Thursday July 23, 2026 @10:49PM (#49030710)
>Hello, say no more I have a perfect solution for this problem…

...proceeds to generate copious amounts of pdf anime pr0n.

Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by nostrademons on Thursday July 23, 2026 @05:47PM (#49028480)
> The Skynet stock rallies.

Interestingly, a lot of people are looking at LLMs or automated drones as "AI", but I think that capitalism is a better contender. It's a self-healing, self-organizing system that has its own logic and seems to have escaped the desires of its human creators. It treats individual firms as the cells within it, individual humans as its DNA molecules, and it even has a form of tissue differentiation via industries. All efforts to shut it off, even through widespread warfare and "tissue" (i.e. human) death, fail, resulting in it becoming even more entrenched.

There's this heavily anthropocentric idea of intelligence that it will look like us, talk like us, and operate on the same scale as us, but it's highly likely that the next layer of intelligence will operate on a much higher level than us, and our intelligence will be to it as DNA replication is to ourselves.

Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by GolfPopper on Thursday July 23, 2026 @08:05PM (#49029726)
SF author Charlie Stross delved into this a few years ago:

https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-yo...

Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by CalRobert on Friday July 24, 2026 @04:32AM (#49032793)
“. If I predict that in 2027 LTE cellular phones will be everywhere, 5G will be available for high bandwidth applications, and fallback to satellite data service will be available at a price, you won't laugh at me. It's not like I'm predicting that airliners will fly slower and Nazis will take over the United States, is it?”
Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by throwaway27448 on Thursday July 23, 2026 @06:07PM (#49028696)
I 100% agree that skynet is most satisfying when read a metaphor for the market. I was extremely surprised with the rise of LLMs that so many people took the threat of AI as literal.
Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by ozim on Thursday July 23, 2026 @07:49PM (#49029618)
But we already embraced this way of thinking since introduction of „corporate personhood”.
Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by ghaff on Thursday July 23, 2026 @08:26PM (#49029876)
One can disagree about aspects of corporate financing of elections etc. while also accepting that everything doesn't get thrown up in the air if a corporate officer leaves for another company. Corporations are established entities that effectively act as a person for certain purposes--though one is welcome to disagree about the extent of those purposes. I expect most people here wouldn't, for example, be opposed to corporations donating to open source projects or other charitable causes.
Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by idiotsecant on Thursday July 23, 2026 @11:52PM (#49031044)
This is a strawman. Why do you have to be a person to donate to charities?
Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by ghaff on Friday July 24, 2026 @01:11PM (#49038679)
Corporations donate to 501(c)3s as entities and even have matching gifts. In fact, a lot of charities have corporations/foundations as some of their largest contributors.
Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by ozim on Friday July 24, 2026 @02:00PM (#49039406)
There is a world of difference between supporting open source software or any pro bono foundation

and

supporting election candidacy.

I think a 2yo will get the distinction and you are asking for clarification?

Besides that go read up on 80’s literature on corporations. Like Gibson or Stephenson.

Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by Alpha3031 on Thursday July 23, 2026 @11:03PM (#49030792)
> escaped the desires of its human creators

I wonder if we will ever solve the corporate-superorganism-alignment problem and why the AI alignment people rarely (as far as I can tell anyway, though I admit I'm not in the field) talk about it considering it (complicated multi-human systems) does seem to be about as good as a model organism as we can get before we actually have AI to align.

Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by trencedamp on Friday July 24, 2026 @05:12AM (#49033020)
We can't solve that problem because we're all trapped by it. There's about as much chance of cows solving the problem of being human food
Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by Alpha3031 on Friday July 24, 2026 @08:06AM (#49034389)
Previous changes to society were also made by people within society so I don't see how that follows.
Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by palmotea on Thursday July 23, 2026 @11:50PM (#49031033)
> but I think that capitalism is a better contender. It's a self-healing, self-organizing system that has its own logic and seems to have escaped the desires of its human creators.

Except capitalism is an ideology not a system. And I think (in its current form) it serves the desires of some of its human "creators," while failing many, many others. Those creators then fund huge amounts of propaganda to indoctrinate adherents to sustain its dysfunctions.

Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by phs318u on Friday July 24, 2026 @02:18AM (#49031808)
> capitalism is a better contender. It's a self-healing, self-organizing system that has its own logic and seems to have escaped the desires of its human creators. It treats individual firms as the cells within it, individual humans as its DNA molecules, and it even has a form of tissue differentiation via industries

This is not a new idea. Howard Bloom (author of The Lucifer Principle [0]) developed the idea that among intelligeng beings "memetic evolution" > "genetic evolution" i.e. the unit of selection is the "idea" as expressed in social/political groupings. In this view of the world, the survival of individuals are less important than the survival of the "group concept" (not the set of genes i.e. the tribal "badge" > the tribal genes). e.g. Judaism, mercantilism, Catholicism, free-market capitalism etc etc.

Definitely worth a read.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lucifer_Principle

Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by ChaitanyaSai on Saturday July 25, 2026 @12:29AM (#49044541)
> self-healing self-organizing system that has its own logic

Great way to to put and it seems to be the gradient for all biological intelligence. Compete until you figure out cooperation and communication. Communication glues together intelligent entities into systems where the systems take on a life and agency of their own. In our case it was language gluing us together first into tribes, shared stories into culture.

You might enjoy our book https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/60500189-journey-of-t...

Also, nostrademons, your "name" is one of the few I recognize here on HN as there's usually something interesting and you weave it into words so well. Thanks!

Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by georgemcbay on Thursday July 23, 2026 @06:20PM (#49028834)
> Skynet lobbyists descend upon Washington.

2026 Skynet wouldn't bother sending humans to lobby in Washington, lobbying is a slow and outdated way of currying government favor with no assurances of success.

2026 Skynet would just move a large block of cryptocurrency over to World Liberty Financial and get itself a guaranteed blanket presidential pardon.

Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by Terr_ on Thursday July 23, 2026 @09:38PM (#49030314)
> get itself a guaranteed blanket presidential pardon

Likely already in-mind for parent poster, but a fitting headline from this week: "Trump Invents the Corporate Pardon."

(https://newrepublic.com/article/213393/trump-corporate-pardo...)

Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by zombot on Friday July 24, 2026 @03:13AM (#49032174)
The ever-expanding swamp of corruption. But since the US legal system is so obsessed with precedence, these feces will stick.
Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by superxpro12 on Friday July 24, 2026 @02:57AM (#49032052)
so its like a "dont look up" thing now... yeah probably.
Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by trencedamp on Friday July 24, 2026 @05:07AM (#49033000)
Skynet warns of a new version of itself that's even more dangerous, so dangerous it's limiting release. Stock rallies again. New version is released, seems the same but the original skynet is suddenly less lethal and slower.