Opinion
Palmer Luckey argues traditional defense contractors are entirely incompetent at AI.
“The companies that are doing defense work are totally incompetent when it comes to machine learning, AI, computer vision, and the companies that are good at those things refuse to work with DOD.”
Opinion
Palmer Luckey calls Department of Defense innovation projects pure PR theater.
“There's all these people at DOD who have this job, basically their job is to generate things that look real enough to make a press release, or to do a panel, or to release a video, or to talk to Congress, and none of it is actually real, or useful, or deployab…”
Insight
Palmer Luckey argues refusing to build precision weapons is morally reprehensible.
“If you can make something that allows for more precision strike, less collateral damage, I think it'd be morally reprehensible to refuse to do it, to try and keep your own hands.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Palmer Luckey: Virtual reality will be humanity's final dominant media platform
“The final media platform, not just the next one, but the final one. I wasn't sure if it'd be the next one or if it was ready, but I knew that in the end, virtual reality was going to be the dominant media platform.”
Insight
Luckey: Disruption of defense cost-plus contracting requires massive scale
“Like you might build some fun gizmos and gadgets, you might get some things out there, but you're not going to be able to destroy the defense industrial complex and shift everybody from cost plus contracting models to product models where you actually are acco…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Luckey: High-training neural interfaces will launch in military before consumer tech
“I think the most powerful uses of these types of Human and computer interfaces are going to be ones that do require many hours of training. You know, imagine if I could, let's say, wear a band that is detecting a lot of the, Electrical activity in my median ne…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Luckey: Top US Tech Companies Unprecedentedly Avoid Partnering With Military
“Because for the first time in history, most innovative technology companies in America are largely not working with the United States military. That's truly unprecedented. There's never been a point in US history where that was the case.”
Assertion Supported
Palmer Luckey: Chinese companies are selling lethal weaponized drones abroad
“The Chinese in particular have a variety of companies that are building Weaponized drones with, you know, really lethal systems on them. And those are being sold to other countries right now.”
Assertion Supported
Luckey: All components for original Oculus Rift existed 3 years prior
“And what's weird about the Rift is it could have been built about three years, like literally every component that I used in the original Oculus Rift prototype which I call PR six. It was the sixth major revision of my designs. Every single part in it Existed …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Palmer Luckey estimates 80 percent of tech workers support a strong military.
“In fact, I'd say probably eight out of 10 people working in the tech industry If you ask them, do you want the United States to have the strongest military in the world? Eight out of 10 would give you a strong yes.”
Opinion
Luckey: The US is far and away the best global superpower option
“I think that America as a whole has made a lot of mistakes, but if you look around the world and you look at what the other options are, we are far and away the best choice.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Luckey: Every VR Company in History Failed Before Oculus
“Every VR company in history had failed spectacularly.”
Insight
Luckey: Oculus Rift Succeeded by Offloading Optical Correction to GPU Shaders
“What the Rift did was say, wait a sec, we can correct for lots of lens aberrations in software in real time. Geometric distortion, we can do that in a shader on a graphics card. Chromatic aberration, we can correct for that in a shader on a graphics card.
[213…”
Disclosure
Luckey: I built an assisted ramjet supersonic quadcopter project at Facebook
“This was actually what I was working on when I was at Facebook, I had a side project. Me and a few guys were in Atherton, and we got kicked out of Atherton because we were making so much noise. But we were building a project called ASRAM, the assisted ramjet, …”
Disclosure
Luckey: Anduril's first pitch deck targeted saving taxpayers hundreds of billions
“And from the beginning, I mean, in our first pitch deck, it said, we are going to become a company that saves taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars a year and makes tens of billions of dollars a year.”
Assertion Supported
Luckey: Early VR competitors like Oculus and Sony shared research and hardware
“Very quickly, the nascent VR players, whether they were big like Sony or small like Oculus,
We kind of decided it was going to be in our best interest to collaborate, and we actually did.
Like, we shared a ton of research.
We shared our interest, our research …”
Disclosure
Anduril's Lattice platform fuses thousands of sensors into real-time 3D models.
“I mean, we haven't talked about it much yet, but I mean, what we build with Lattice, it's an AI sensor fusion platform that can take data from thousands of sensors and merge it into a real-time, three D model of everything, and then tag everything in the model…”
Assertion Contradicted
Luckey: NASA Conceived Real-Time VR Lens Correction in the 1960s
“People had come up with this at NASA, literally in the sixties and seventies, but the computational power hadn't existed, and the idea was just forgotten.”
Disclosure
Luckey: I maintain a list of forgotten technologies ripe for comeback
“I mean, I have a whole list on my computer of things that are this, basically forgotten technology. Things that didn't work in the past, and that are right for a comeback.”
Assertion Partly supported
Luckey: Oculus had only 45 employees when acquired by Facebook
“We were like 45 people when the Facebook acquisition was announced.”
Assertion Partly supported
Luckey: Anduril Ghost Drone Flies 6.5 Hours on Hydrogen Fuel Cell
“So cruise at about 85 miles an hour. It can fly for up to two hours on a battery and up to six and a half hours on a hydrogen fuel cell, which clips on and places the battery.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Luckey: Anduril Ghost Drone Is Completely Inaudible at 100 Meters
“At a hundred meters, it is inaudible to the human ear. And because it's a helicopter, it's very, very skinny and very, very short. And we stack everything all in a line. When you look at it dead on, it's like this big, like this is the front of the thing. So t…”
Assertion Supported
Palmer Luckey: A non-explosive Hellfire missile variant limits collateral damage
“There's a new version of the Hellfire that basically just runs into people. It doesn't even have explosives. It just runs into targets and is, has very little collateral damage.”
Palmer Luckey