The Ledger, every show

“Last year we flew a real fighter jet and we flew the Saab Gripen over the Baltic Sea. And when I say we, our AI did and took full control of the plane in air combat against and another Gripen, which was human controlled. And so we flew three air combat scenari…”

“Crude manned, you know, fighter jets were going to be very difficult to deploy in the future because you'll, you'll end up Facing these swarms of autonomous fighter jets with superhuman capabilities, and it's not science fiction.”

“Over time there just won't be, I think the capability even of partners and as it looks to also not the willingness to do so.”

“I think the threat is extremely plausible in the next few years.”

“I, again, I think it's plausible that there will be a conflict. When? It's hard to tell. I don't think it's 10 years away if it happens. It's probably quite a lot sooner than that.”

“I think it's going to be a battle of materiel. It's machines versus machines. The reason for this is that the autonomous mass, as we call it, so the number of drones that can fly in a coordinated way is getting better and better, and it's going to be very hard…”

“And at the same time, if you want to have humans on the battlefield, I think it's going to be very difficult. And I think the trend is going to be, and I think people are realizing this, is that it's going to be unethical to send humans on a battlefield where …”

“Back then the defense of a country or of a democratic society was grouped for banks in the same bucket as pornography and gambling and smoking.”

“When we started Helsing in March, 2021, we actually put one of our slides that we thought there were going to be two galvanizing events. One of them was going to be an invasion of Ukraine by Russia, the other one an invasion of Taiwan by China.”

“The thing that we have to avoid is the Tesla moment for the defense sector. If we collectively, including the primes, don't understand that and don't adapt, the same thing is going to happen to defense, As happened to the car industry.”

“At the moment you have one operator operating one drone. That's going to happen It's going to happen quite quickly that that's going to change, and you'll be able, as a single operator, to control multiple drones, and that trend, I think, we'll see playing out…”

“You'll, it'll be impossible, and I think ethically extremely problematic, to send humans into a battlefield that is essentially Facing large numbers of autonomous intelligence systems on the other side.”

“In general, they're not incentivized to Spend a lot of their own money on R&D. I think it's probably less than five percent or so.”

“A very small number. An extremely small number.”

“I think for some of the more fragmented tail, I think they're maybe not to zero, but I think they're going, going to go down.”

“So, so all of these companies would be competing for a very small pool of people, and I, it's just impossible to have turned them all into primes. It will just, it just not gonna happen.”

“Pretty much the whole frontline is GPS jammed, so you can't use your GPS receiver, so you need to find a different way to navigate and know where you are. You either do that with a human trying to recognize where they are, just almost like a pilot of a plane d…”

“And this happened after two years and four months of founding the company. I think we became the fastest to go from founding to program off record.”

“Well, I, I've seen actually quite a lot of people turn around, including at my previous company as well, in, on a performance management plan. So it's not a foregone conclusion.”

“I think it's less than one percent.”

“I believe Ukraine is, is building one and a half million FPV drones, the small first person view drones, drones a year. I think Russia is building roughly the same.”

“I don't think that there is a lack of capital in Europe. Certainly not seed, series A, symptoms even series B.”

“I'm not sure whether we'll be able to create those companies kind of in the next two or three years to a point where they provide sufficient sovereignty, but I'm very sure we can do it over the next five to 10 years.”

“And for artillery systems as well, if artillery systems try to hide 40 to 50 kilometers away from the front, ah, to shoot, you can still find them with drones and you can attack them with drones.”

“The US had companies like Andrew and Palantir that were very forward looking defense companies with a big focus on, AI, cheaper hardware, and abundant hardware and the idea of mass manufacturing, but Europe had nothing, and so we felt we have to do this”

“Very difficult to raise money in 21 for defense, like no VC wanted to talk to us, and we didn't even try in the end, so we just raised money from individuals, family offices, and then we were lucky that Daniel you know, put in a hundred million euros of his ow…”

“We came in with an AI-based approach, deep learning-based approach that kind of recover that ability to interpret those radars, and it was a big technology jump, and we managed to win that program of record together with our partner Saab against, you know, a l…”

“It's also the country that has in absolute terms, probably now the biggest growing defense budget, going from fifty two billion euros last year to originally, I think, hundred and fifty three billion in 2029. I think it's gone up again to over one hundred and …”

“So then we started a long collaboration with Rockstar Games, who ended up using our technology in GTA IV, GTA V, Redemption, and a whole range of other games.”

“We ended up using it in, and licensing it for visual effects in big Hollywood movies, like Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Spider-Man, then for big video games like GTA IV, GTA V Max Payne and many others”

“Look at Poland, Poland has gone from, I think, 2.1% or so to 4.7 within just a few years.”

“Iran is producing a large number of drones already. They've been you know, using and working on the Shahad, for example, for a long time. They've licensed that design to Russia. Russia is now manufacturing it itself.”