New Delhi:
Large language models (LLMs) will be at the level of a great Nobel laureate in terms of brain power in addition to being deadly, General David Howell Petraeus (retired), who headed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), said at the NDTV World Summit today.
"At some point we can have multiple agents working for us, so as a commander, let's say, these would be staff officers now who never sleep, never eat and never have to take a break. They are Nobel laureates in terms of brainpower and they will no longer just be monitoring, reporting and searching the world for me as my current LLM does," General Petraeus said.
"You could have autonomous systems gathering your air defence picture. Air and ballistic missile defense will be a mix of radars, acoustic sensors, all that, all magically helped by AI to fuse because it's all data at the end of the day. Fuse into a high-fidelity air picture," General Petraeus said.
To a question by NDTV on whether there was one latest piece of combat technology that was proving to be a game changer in what has been happening in Ukraine right now, the former CIA director said autonomy is something that "we all have to grapple with."
"How do you keep the human in the loop? The human is not in the loop anymore. The human is on the loop. The human helps develop it. That is what we are going to see at some point in time, and I've written about this, actually: autonomous systems of autonomous systems, where the actual drones themselves will be autonomous," he said.
"There might be a direction to launch them, although that could even be done by an agent. Agentic AI is going to transform things. By the way, keep in mind how fast AI is moving," he added.
General Petraeus explained the complex ways in which AI could behave on the battlefield.
"You have an agent watching the high-fidelity air picture who knows what systems are out there that can be launched. Will make a decision and say, 'okay, this drone that's coming in, let's launch that drone interceptor'. It may launch it again with its decision and it will autonomously go in and carry out the mission against that particular drone.
"That's where we're headed and that does pose enormous ethical issues and ethical concerns. But again we still haven't even transformed to where we are right now on the battlefield in Ukraine, which, again, is far and away the most advanced in the world. That is the future of war," the former CIA director who served from September 2011 till November 2012 said.
General Petraeus highlighted how warfare has totally transformed in the sense that traditional maneuver warfare, tanks, infantry, engineers, air defence, electronic warfare, "all of that can't survive."
"You basically have what could be called a kill zone or a death zone, which extends from wherever the frontline of troops is, which is not a line anymore. By the way if you have trenches you can fly a drone into a trench. Anything that is exposed will be seen.
The frontlines now are actually soldiers underground. They can't even see out except because they have observation devices. They are resupplied not by humans with vehicles, but by remotely driven ground vehicles and remotely piloted air vehicles. By the way we're not yet at truly autonomous warfare.
"There is experimentation with systems that do not require a human to pilot or drive it but they are still very early, although we will begin to see, I think, greater numbers of that maybe by the end of this year or sometime next year. That will be another transformation," General Petraeus said.