Prediction Not checkable as stated
Bry: Mass AI Drone Swarms Will Outperform Multi-Billion-Dollar Legacy Weapons
“Buying legacy exquisite systems that cost hundreds of millions of dollars, some cases billions of dollars, there's a trade-off between, like, one or two of something, or, you know, 10,000, or a 100,000, or a million drones, and, you know, if you just look into…”
Insight
Bry: Autonomous AI Strikes Cause Less Collateral Damage Than Unguided Bombs
“Oftentimes, you know, your choice if you want to take out a target is dropping a 500 or 2000 pound bomb, which is going to cause widespread destruction and a lot of collateral damage. And so, an AI system that might be using autonomy to, like, a pretty intense…”
Insight
Bry: Modern Military Conflict Is Becoming a Software-Writing Fight
“I think a modern conflict becomes basically like a software writing fight.”
Assertion Supported
Bry: U.S. Drone Procurement Lags Demand by Three Orders of Magnitude
“The U.S. Military, I think to their credit, has programs generally pointed in this direction but those programs are operating at the scale of thousands, like single-digit thousands. So we're literally off by, like, three orders of magnitude, I would argue, rel…”
Disclosure
Bry: Skydio's First Drone Generation Failed in Ukraine Battlefield Conditions
“Candidly, like, our first round of drones in Ukraine basically failed.”
Assertion Supported
Bry: U.S. Army Quadcopter Requirements Originally Omitted Electronic Warfare Capability
“Had built the system largely informed by the US Army's requirements for what they thought was important for a quadcopter in this space. And electronic warfare was just nowhere on that list.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bry: Skydio Software Updates Can Take Up to Two Years to Deploy
“We've had the same experience where, like, sometimes it's taken us two years to push new software into deployed systems.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Adam Bry: Single human operators will eventually control thousands of military drones
“You can have one operator responsible for multiple drones. Five, 1000, and eventually maybe someday thousands. And I think that's a super, super powerful operating paradigm.”
Insight
Bry: Tech firms should bear R&D risk while military buys products
“I think Andrew in particular has done a nice job of trying to sort of like advocate for this new model where companies should be taking product development risk and the government should be focused on, on, on just buying the best product, which is, is difficul…”
Disclosure
Brie: Skydio bet on computer vision over heavy, expensive LiDAR sensors
“We did a lot of work with LiDAR, but the vehicles were super heavy, super expensive. So when we started Skydio, we made a big bet on vision because we felt like the progress that's happening in computer vision now especially with deep learning, but even in sor…”
Assertion Supported
Bry: Cheap Drones Can Destroy Multi-Million Dollar Military Hardware
“A system that costs a few thousand dollars can take out a system that costs a few million dollars.”
Prediction Held up
Bry Predicts US Adversaries Will Exploit Low-Cost Autonomous Drones
“The possibility of building very low-cost systems that are very capable and capable of delivering strikes or capable of maintaining surveillance is, is very real, and our adversaries are likely to take advantage of it.”
Opinion
Bry: Outsourcing Consumer Electronics to China Was a Military Mistake
“And, you know, as a country, we basically outsource manufacturing to China. And I think that that was a, you know, a series of policy decisions, expediency on the part of business. That was a mistake from a military standpoint, because one of the major themes …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Bry: AI Autonomy and Swarming Will Transform Drone Warfare Within a Decade
“And I think that we are going to see over the next decade Another fundamental change as rather than having these drones animated by an operator on the ground or by like relatively simple algorithms on board, they become animated by really advanced autonomy and…”
Insight
Bry: Winning in Defense AI Is More Critical Than Hardware Scale
“You can't forget about the hardware and the manufacturing capacity. You need to be able to do that stuff, but winning on the AI front I think is, is even more important.”
Assertion Supported
Bry: Ukraine Consumes Millions of Small Drones Annually for Warfare
“If you look in the kind of space that we play, which are small, light quadcopters that weigh a few pounds that are kind of soldier-carried the Ukrainians today are using these things at the rate of millions per year, literally millions per year. It's the prima…”
Insight
Bry: Relinquishing Control Over Kinetic Weapon Outcomes Is Not a New Concept
“At the conceptual level, a lot of these things are less new than they seem. So like, you know, dropping a bomb in World War II, like once that thing leaves the bomber, it's autonomous. Now it's, you know, it's pretty dumb autonomy, but there's no, you know, hu…”
Opinion
Bry: US AI Policy Is Rapidly Improving Under the New Administration
“In AI, and I think this is changing rapidly for the better with the new administration, you know, there was a lot of talk of, like safety and regulation, and we can't do this, and we can't have this many parameters, and if you use more than this much compute, …”
Insight
Bry: Regions Building iPhones Hold the Ecosystem for Manufacturing Drones
“I always say, like, wherever they're building iPhones, they're gonna have a really good ecosystem for building drones and other kinds of electronics.”
Assertion Supported
Bry: Most Drone Warfare in Ukraine Remains Manual or Simple Navigation
“The vast majority of what's happening in Ukraine is still basically one-to-one. Like you've got these FPV pilots who are expert operators who are flying the thing, or they're flying drones with like, with very limited kinds of, you know, pretty simple mission,…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bry: Commercial Drone Light Show Technology Is Irrelevant in Modern Warfare
“So when you see the drone light shows, they're a hundred percent reliant on GPS. So they're using GPS to figure out where they are and to position themselves precisely. And they're a hundred percent reliant on a, like a comms link between all the drones all th…”
Insight
Brie: Autonomous flight is essential for scaling drone applications
“Most of them, we think at their core, in order to really work and in order to really scale, need an autonomous foundation.”
Disclosure
Brie: Skydio drones use 13 cameras and NVIDIA TX1 for autonomy
“We have 13 cameras on the device, they see in every direction, and then at its core it has a super powerful computer. We're using the NVIDIA TX-one, which is basically like a deep learning supercomputer that uses the same GPU design, the same architecture that…”
Opinion
Brie: Commercial drone market is less mature and wider than consumer
“There are a lot of exciting things on the commercial side, and in a lot of ways I would say it's kind of less mature and wide open than consumer even.”
