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My point was that the recent flourishing in LLMs and imagegen/image recognition (downstream applications of the GPU/accelerated computing trend) have immediate military applications. There are going to be inherent synergies between 'lets build a really large language model' and 'let's mass-translate all these intercepted communications quickly enough to matter' and so on. It's a general-purpose technology.
As for your point about AI not taking the friction out of warfare, I say sure. Maybe absolute simulation is too hard. But what about improved simulation? What about improved tactics? We already use limited human brains to practice wargames and think up attack scenarios. Why not get machine intelligence as well?
A meteorologist can't tell you where a hurricane will be in two weeks, it's the AI model that tells you. Predicting weather is one of the more obvious use-cases of the new techniques, Deepmind's Graphcast for instance. We can improve current predictions with this method. We can reduce friction and increase strength.
I think all of this is more or less correct. (I don't think I saw you, specifically, as being particularly distressed about this, I was just reacting to a vibe.) I suppose to me AI is already in the military and there's no closing the barn door now. And I don't think it's dumb to bring AI into the fix.
I do think that an underrated danger is that AI is so good at seeing patterns that it could loop over to being easier to spoof than humans. There is of course the joke about spoofing Terminator with the grocery barcode, but if I wanted to mess up hostile AI image detection software, I would use very specific, distinctive (to AI, not necessarily to humans) camouflage patterns patterns on all of my vehicles for years, ensuring that hostile imagery models were trained to inseparably associate that with my forces - and then repaint every vehicle in wartime. That trick would never work on a human (although there are lots of tricks that do) but it might fool an AI.
My point here isn't that AI is dumb, but merely that it's just as easy to imagine ways they introduce more friction into warfare as remove friction. Moreoever, if intelligence apparatuses are defaulting to filtering all intelligence and data through a few AI models instead of many human minds, it means that a single blindspot or failing is likely to be systemwide, instead of many, many small blindspots scattered across different commands. And if there are hostile AI (or even just smart people) on both sides, they will figure out the patterns in hostile artificial intelligence programs and figure out how to exploit them. (I think the conclusion here is that intel agencies should take a belt-and-suspenders humans-and-AI approach, and developing multiple AI programs to assess intelligence and data might be a good idea.)
One of the things we've seen in Ukraine is that when countermeasures for a high-tech weapons system are developed, the weapons system loses a lot of value very quickly. (This isn't new - World War Two saw a rapid proliferation of new technologies that edged out older warfighting gear - but our development cycles seem longer than they were in the 1940s, which does pose a problem.) I suspect that in a future AI reliant war, we will see similar patterns: when a model becomes obsolete, it will fail catastrophically and operate at a dramatically reduced capacity until it is patched. (Since a lot of the relevant stuff in Ukraine revolves around signal processing and electronic warfare, this future is more or less now.)
In conclusion, I am cautiously optimistic that "AI" can reduce friction and increase strength, but I think the "AI" that is most certain to do that as, really, "targeting computers," and "signal processing software," not necessarily the stuff OpenAI is working on (although I don't count that out). Since I think that multiple powers will be using AI, I think that hostile AI will be adding friction about as fast as friendly AI can reduce is (depending on their parity.) What concerns me about AI use in warfare is the dangers of over-relying on it, both in terms of outsourcing too much brainpower to it, but also in terms of believing that "reducing friction" will save us the need to sharpen the pointy meatspace end of things. At the end of the day, being able to predict what someone is going to do next doesn't matter if you've got an empty gat.
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