Intellectia News

Former Google chief Eric Schmidt thinks the US Army should expunge "useless" tanks and replace them with AI-powered drones instead. From a report: Speaking at the Future Investment Initiative in Saudi Arabia this week, he said: "I read somewhere that the US had thousands and thousands of tanks stored somewhere," adding, "Give them away. Buy a drone instead." The former Google supremo's argument is that recent conflicts, such as the war in Ukraine, have demonstrated how "a $5,000 drone can destroy a $5 million tank." In fact, even cheaper drones, similar to those commercially available for consumers, have been shown in footage on social media dropping grenades through the open turret hatch of tanks. Schmidt, who was CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011, then executive chairman to 2015, and executive chairman of Alphabet to 2018, founded White Stork with the aim of supporting Ukraine's war effort. It hopes to achieve this by developing a low-cost drone that can use AI to acquire its target rather than being guided by an operator and can function in environments where GPS jamming is in operation. Notably, Schmidt also served as chair of the US government's National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI), which advised the President and Congress about national security and defense issues with regard to AI. "The cost of autonomy is falling so quickly that the drone war, which is the future of conflict, will get rid of eventually tanks, artillery, mortars," Schmidt predicted. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AzWa Snowbird writes: Burning Man is urgently calling for millions more in donations amid faltering ticket sales and staff layoffs. The nonprofit's CEO, Marian Goodell, primarily blamed flagging higher-priced ticket sales and increased operating costs since the pandemic. The festival has sold a tier of higher-priced tickets since at least 2016. In 2023, a limited number of more expensive advance tickets were available between Feb. 1 and Feb. 3, with 1,000 tickets costing $2,750 each and 3,000 costing $1,500, according to an archived version of Burning Man's 2023 ticket page. Ticket sales for the annual bacchanal in Black Rock City flopped this year after a rain-plagued 2022, and scores of burners later resold their tickets, eating huge losses. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is advancing the release timeline for Android 16, shifting it to the second quarter of 2025 to better align with new device launches and accelerate access to its latest AI and machine learning resources. It should also "enable app creators and phone companies to prepare their products for the new software more quickly," reports CNET. From the report: [I]n a big-picture sense, the change could help facilitate a new wave of apps with more AI integration, considering developers will get access to Google's latest machine learning and AI resources even sooner. "We're in a once-in-a-generation moment to completely reimagine what our smartphones can do and how we interact with them," Google's Seang Chau, who took on the role of vice president and general manager of the Android Platform earlier this year, said in an interview with CNET. "It's a really exciting time for smartphones, and we've been putting a lot of thought into what we want to do next with them." In addition to moving up the major release, Google will roll out a minor update in the fourth quarter of 2025 with feature updates, optimizations and bug fixes. It's a notable switch from Google's usual release timeline, but it's just one of several changes the company has made to the way it distributes Android updates in an effort to add features more frequently. [...] "Things are moving quite fast in the AI world right now," Chau said. "So we want to make sure that we get those developer [application programming interfaces], especially around machine learning and AI, available to our developers so they can build these capabilities faster and get them out to our users faster." Read more of this story at Slashdot.