✈️ AI Wingmen Are Right Around the Corner

Hello, fellow nerds 🧙

For the fellow Fallout nerds out there, the first season of “Fallout” has just been released on Amazon Prime, and the verdict?

It slaps. Actually. To our relief, it’s not like the Fallout 76 release…The show’s been getting high praise everywhere, and boy oh boy we can’t wait to binge it this weekend. If any of you nerds check it out, let us know what ya think!

Here’s the daily quests in AI to complete today:

• ✈️ AI Wingmen Are Right Around the Corner

• ⚔️ Hard Numbers from The Knights of The Tech Table

• 🎮️ Throwback Thursday

• 🧠 Neural Plasticity at its Finest

AI Wingmen Are Right Around the Corner

So the Air Force is making a major push into autonomous drone warfare with its new "Collaborative Combat Aircraft" initiative. We're talking plans for a future fleet of unmanned AI-controlled warplanes operating as "loyal wingmen."

The concept is having these drone squadrons team up with a piloted jet, but with the AI planes executing the riskier aerial assault missions through enemy airspace with minimal human oversight required. Essentially, the drones take the risk of punching through air defenses and the human pilots follow through once a path is cleared.

It's an ambitious plan that the Air Force leadership is clearly putting a ton of faith into. So much so that the Secretary himself, Frank Kendall, plans to strap into an F-16 that’s been converted into an AI-piloted jet for a supervised test flight later this spring. Though he'll have a human pilot riding along, the goal is for the autonomous system to potentially handle all the flying duties unassisted.

Now, this level of autonomy in the air space is fairly new territory. While unmanned drones have been part of military operations for years now, there's still a degree of uncertainty around removing the human factor completely. The idea of this was inevitable, but hearing it come to fruition? Seems like a big security concern in regards to the planes being hacked. Hopefully, that won’t be the case.

The Knights of The Tech Table Give Hard Numbers

The consortium from yesterday gave their ruling: their goal is to help 95 million workers that’ll be impacted by AI-driven job losses reskill for new roles over the next 10 years.

According to ZDnet:

• Cisco hopes to "train 25 million people with cybersecurity and digital skills by 2032."

• IBM plans to "skill 30 million individuals by 2030 in digital skills, including 2 million in AI."

• Intel aims to train "more than 30 million people with AI skills for current and future jobs by 2030."

• Microsoft will "train and certify 10 million people from underserved communities with in-demand digital skills for jobs and livelihood opportunities in the digital economy by 2025."

• SAP hopes to "upskill 2 million people worldwide by 2025."

• Google announced "EUR 25 million in funding to support AI training and skills for people across Europe."

We're talking about major retraining investments and certifications in digital skills, cybersecurity, and other AI-proof vocations.

Ideally, these are future-proof gigs that the machines can't swallow yet. If the corporations manage to hit those benchmarks, it could genuinely soften the blow.

But will this all be a little too late? They’ve projected 10 years and 95 million workers in total, but damn, a lot is gonna change in 10 years. Hell, even the next 5 years is gonna drastically change.

⌛️ Throwback Thursday

A little blast from the past.

Pippin. No, not Scotty Pippen. We’re talking the game/computer console released by Apple in 1995… and then discontinued by 1997.

So what the hell happened?

Well, this poor guy really didn’t stand a chance, and for a few reasons.

Price
This puppy was priced at a shocking $600. Which, even in today’s terms is quite up there in price. For reference, the Nintendo 64 was out, and it was only $200. A vast difference, especially with the vast library of games the 64 had.

Lack of games
Speaking of a vast library of games, well, the Pippin never had that. Add a lack of games with the price, we’d call that a recipe for a dumpster fire. But as Billy Mays used to say, “But wait, there’s more!”

The target market was (fill in the blank)
And quite literally, the target market was a fill in the blank situation. The Pippin was first targeted towards gamers, and then it wanted to be your home computer system, but did another turn and was targeted at being something for cable? To be honest, this kinda sounds reminiscent to the Xbox One announcement…

The true nail in the coffin
What really did the Pippin in was competition. As far as timing goes, this was the worst possible time for Apple to release a “game console”. The Nintendo 64, the PlayStation, and the Sega Saturn, the juggernauts of the 90’s, were straight murdering the market when Pippin released.

Now, we’ve all got fond memories on at least one of the juggernauts, or all of them for that matter, which is more than most Pippin users could ever say, unfortunately.

As a little caveat to this entire story, if you’re unfamiliar with Apple’s timeline, this period was when Steve Jobs was ousted as CEO. He came back in 1997, and to no surprise, kicked Pippin to the curb. Lil’ console never stood a chance.

Daily Delight

Just something fun and interesting around the web.

What’s happening inside the Realm

A list of side quests to explore and more.

• Adobe has begun buying up video footage for $3 a minute to train its future text-to-video AI model in hopes of competing with Sora.

• Dyson is gamifying vacuuming by adding a new AR feature that’ll show where you’ve vacuumed and where you haven’t.

• The AI arms race just keeps getting more heated as Google, OpenAI, and Mistral all released a new version of their models 12 hours apart.

• Microsoft tried pitching DALL-E 3 to the Department of Defense as a tool for battlefield visualization, which kinda goes against OpenAI’s entire mission statement.

That’s all the quests we have for today. Check back tomorrow for more!

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