Four Battlegrounds: Power in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

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But he keeps those biases separate enough from his military analysis that I don't find those biases to be a reason for not reading the book. That being said, the first chapter detailed a lot of worry and intensity around these authoritarian regimes and what they are doing and planning with AI. Four Battlegrounds thus does not devote extended attention to the framework’s implications for the MENA region. S.-based technology multinationals — including IBM and Google — begin modestly investing in the continent’s AI potential, seeking to link technological innovation in public health and medicine with a burgeoning, tech-savvy youth demographic. But LLMs and other generative AIs are not everything, and they still face serious technical challenges in reducing “hallucinations” for their integration into enterprise systems.

A generic anti-military stance among tech workers has ensured that those companies cooperate less with the US military. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. I was surprised at the avoidance of science fiction examples, especially when the book considers problems of AI taking over human decision making. Nations that capitalize on these four battlegrounds will hold the high ground whether they do so singly or in combination. None of this is to exaggerate the hand that open-source AI is dealing to tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Open AI.AI’s tools, when programmed properly, alleviate burdensome human time constraints allowing for magnitudes faster repetitions and learning when algorithms are written and released appropriately. Conceivably that could mean that large countries could be outcompeted by a small country that bypassed such precautions (Israel? The text is also very critical of AI used for authoritarian purposes, very much the case in China currently. Those comments seem mostly true, but carefully selected to overstate the differences between the countries.

The move came after Falcon-40B topped AI company Hugging Face’s Open LLM Leaderboard in June 2023, beating out previously leading open-source models like Meta’s LLaMA, while its smaller counterpart, Falcon-7B, is top in its weight class (note that some state-of-the-art models, like OpenAI’s GPT-4, are closed-source). My intuition says this is mostly more important than is deploying the AI technology that existed in 2022. Many of the examples involve generative AI and I think it might be better to define these techniques as advanced predictive analytics. Much of the later work, however, is squarely focused on the potential threat in cyberwarfare from China, which is a primary perspective of the author. Four Battlegrounds takes readers inside the fierce competition to develop and implement this game-changing technology and dominate the future.Water-strapped MENA states, for example, may not be able to tolerate the water-cooling needs of systems like ChatGPT indefinitely (which, over millions of uses, appears significant). A very useful introduction to and update on AI in war, Four Battlegrounds is very accessible for people new to the topic. First step: Read this book, a farsighted and comprehensive survey of the issues involved and the paths forward.