Prediction Open AI assessment confidence: 90% certainty 3/5 debate potential 2/5

Clerico: Firefighting drones will perform rapid wildfire attacks within a decade

Bill Clerico · No Priors Ep. 98 | With Convective Capital Founder Bill Clerico · Jan 23, 2025 · at 28:00

Bill Clerico, founder of Convective Capital (a wildfire-tech VC fund), discusses the emergence of payload-capable autonomous drone swarms for firefighting with Elad Gil.

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“So in my opinion, I think over the next five to 10 years, we will see exactly what you're talking about drones to do rapid initial attack. So you see you know, you get an ignition that's detected from a camera or satellite. And drones are pre-positioned can get there very quickly before the fire has a chance to grow or drones to do structure protection and defense to go fan out and spray a bunch of houses and you avoid the road and access issues that we saw earlier and you avoid the water issues because they're carrying stuff with them too. So I think that will be a big tool in the toolkit over the next decade.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

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