Yesterday, we told you about ‘the Day of the Last Warrior’, a time when military forces use robotics and AI makes the American warfighter obsolete.
Specifically, we covered iRobot and Google.
Today, we pick up where we left off…at the king of search…
As you know, Google is powering future generations of robots. As we said yesterday, they’ve been on an acquisition binge.
Here’s what they acquired last year alone:
In 2014, they’ve acquired Nest Labs, a home automation success story (and maker of the popular Nest Learning Thermostat. Their team of talented engineers includes former Apple VP and iPod visionary Tony Fadell.
But the most recent, most secretive and perhaps most important acquisition took place last weekend…and it could justify buying Google’s expensive shares: a private company called DeepMind.
DeepMind specialises in something called ‘deep learning’. Shocker, I know.
The thing is…major tech companies are highly competitive for talent in this space.
‘IBM’s Watson supercomputer,’ according to TechCrunch ‘is now working on deep learning.’
Likewise, ‘Yahoo recently acquired photo analysis startup LookFlow to lead its new deep learning group.’
And recently, Facebook hired celebrity scientist Yann LeCun to lead its new AI lab. He’s the guy who invented the optical character recognition tech that banks used throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s that made a scan whenever you wrote a check. Soon enough, Facebook’s facial recognition tech may recognise people in not just photos but also the videos you post… Kind of scary, eh?
But Google outdid Facebook. According to what The Information reported back in December, Google and Facebook vied to purchase DeepMind. Last weekend, Google CEO Larry Page led the deal himself to acquire the three-year-old company for $400 million, considered by some to be ‘the last large independent company with a strong focus on artificial intelligence.’
Talk about competing for talent… DeepMind’s founder Demis Hassabis is a rare seed, indeed. As a child prodigy, chess master, shogi and poker player, he won the World Games Championships at the Mind Sports Olympiad a record five times. Now retired, the latter hailed him as ‘probably the best games player in history’.
Multiple sources said the company has been applying their tech to various potential products such as recommendation system for e-commerce. In light of the high-caliber acquisitions for robotics and AI, Google — despite its priciness — is a great stock.
Google and its subsidiaries are a force to be reckoned with and could be the biggest player bringing about ‘the Day of the Last Warrior,’ despite the fact that they started in search.
As promised, I have one final company to tell you about, a UAV specialist bringing about ‘the Day of the Last Warrior’ that you should know about…
Ever since the US Air Force armed spy drone, the MQ-1 Predator, was armed with guided missiles in the early ’00s, drones have been the source of a lot of fear — and rightly so.
The military space operates differently than the civilian, in that people are more willing to take an area where there’s already a problem — the cost of human life, whether it be from an exploding bomb or through computer code — and replace it with nonliving machinations.
If you’ve ever seen Captain Phillips with Tom Hanks, a movie based on a true story about the rescue of a hostage in an attack on a cargo ship by Somalian pirates, you might recognise this:
The drone is ScanEagle, made by Insitu Inc., a name inspired by the Latin term for ‘in position’ — readiness, in other words. Compared with its big brothers such as the Predator, ScanEagle is tiny.
Its wingspan is 10 feet, and it weighs less than 50 pounds, including payload. The Predator, on the other hand, has a wingspan of nearly 50 feet and weighs in at more than a ton fully loaded. So where Predator requires an airfield to operate, ScanEagle can be launched from a small towed trailer. In theory, a horse could pull this thing (useful in parts of Afghanistan to this day).
But Insitu didn’t start as a big, bad drone maker. In fact, it started pretty small. In 1994, it was a little startup in Washington state, composed of a group of engineers who enjoyed windsurfing together. They set out to improve offshore weather tracking and then got to work improving deep-sea tuna fishing. Yawn.
But when they turned their hot new tech toward the problems facing the troops in Iraq after 2003, they caught the attention of the big three-letter agencies (CIA, FBI, NSA…if you catch my drift). Soon, the old ‘tuna hunter’ was reincarnated as ScanEagle, and things really blew up. In fact, by 2010, revenues reached $400 million, and sales of the ScanEagle platform passed 1,000 orders.
The DoD’s acceptance of their signature drone put Insitu on the map. Now everything from police agencies to oil and gas corporations want a piece of the action.
There’s just one catch. Insitu never went public. In 2008, just five years after their drone tech made them a mil-tech darling, Insitu was bought out by Boeing (BA: NYSE).
But they got the ScanEagle program up and running in the first place through technology sharing and collaboration. Boeing’s bigger initiative to supply the needs of a burgeoning defence sector with mil-tech production lines going far beyond drones like ScanEagle.
‘If there’s only one thing you should remember about this bad boy,’ says our mil-tech guru Byron King, ‘it should be this: American Special Forces operators probably got their first up-close-and-personal look at Osama bin Laden’s secret compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, using one of these.
‘Of course,’ he concedes, ‘I can’t prove that.’ Although he’s rubbed elbows with Donald Rumsfeld, ‘The only people that know for sure,’ he says, ‘have been sworn to secrecy, and rightly so. The details of Operation Neptune Spear are going to remain ‘need to know’ for a long time.’
Josh Grasmick,
Contributing Editor, Money Morning
Ed Note: The above is an edited version of an article originally published in Tomorrow in Review. For your chance to see Tomorrow in Review’s military technology guru Byron King in person and hear him speak about the future of technology and money at Port Phillip Publishing’s World War D conference, click here.