You don't need an LLM to do autonomous weapons, a modern Tomahawk cruise missile is pretty autonomous. The only change to a modern tomahawk would be adding parameters of what the target looks like and tasking the missile with identifying a target. The missile pretty much does everything else already ( flying, routing, etc ).
As I remember it the basic idea is that the new generation of drones is piloted close enough to targets and then the AI takes over for "the last mile". This gets around jamming, which otherwise would make it hard for dones to connect with their targets.
https://www.vp4association.com/aircraft-information-2/32-2/m...
The worries over Skynet and other sci-fi apocalypse scenarios are so silly.
This situation legitimately worries me, but it isn't even really the SkyNet scenario that I am worried about.
To self-quote a reply to another thread I made recently (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47083145#47083641):
When AI dooms humanity it probably won't be because of the sort of malignant misalignment people worry about, but rather just some silly logic blunder combined with the system being directly in control of something it shouldn't have been given control over.
I think we have less to worry about from a future SkyNet-like AGI system than we do just a modern or near future LLM with all of its limitations making a very bad oopsie with significant real-world consequences because it was allowed to control a system capable of real-world damage.
I would have probably worried about this situation less in times past when I believed there were adults making these decisions and the "Secretary of War" of the US wasn't someone known primarily as an ego-driven TV host with a drinking problem.
e.g. 50 people die due to water poisoning issue rather than 10 billion die in a claude code powered nuclear apocalypse
I really doubt that Anthropic is in any kind of position to make those decisions regardless of how they feel.
In theory, you can do this today, in your garage.
Buy a quad as a kit. (cheap)
Figure out how to arm it (the trivial part).
Grab yolo, tuned for people detection. Grab any of the off the shelf facial recognition libraries. You can mostly run this on phone hardware, and if you're stripping out the radios then possibly for days.
The shim you have to write: software to fly the drone into the person... and thats probably around somewhere out there as well.
The tech to build "Screamers" (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screamers_(1995_film) ) already exists, is open source and can be very low power (see: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/O_lz0b792ew ) --
ardupilot + waypoint nav would do it for fixed locations. The camera identifies a target, gets the gps cooridnates and sets a waypoint. I would be shocked if there wasn't extensions available (maybe not officially) for flying to a "moving location". I'm in the high power rocketry hobby and the knowledge to add control surfaces and processing to autonomously fly a rocket to a location is plenty available. No one does it because it's a bad look for a hobby that already raises eyebrows.
Sounds very interesting, but may I ask how this actually works as a hobby? Is it purely theoretical like analyzing and modeling, or do you build real rockets?