In the country, in southern Texas and Louisiana, we're pumping out huge numbers of warships. So this is 100x, I think, our country's production. So you have new companies like those. You have Anduril out competing Lockheed on radars. They're going to prove you can build massive numbers of interceptors over the next year. So I think people are underestimating when you actually outproduce the primes by 10x, by 20x in critical areas, performing as well or better than them, the jig is up, basically. Everyone will realize, wait a second, these primes are these slow, backwards 1980s bureaucracies. They're not able to hire the top talent. They're not able to be nearly as relevant. And I think it shifts to everyone thinks about defense tech when they finally realize that.
Right. I'd like to get specific. There was a Russian drone attack in Ukraine this year that's been cited as the first fully autonomous AI-guided attack drone. That means it's capable of identifying and striking a target without a human operator making the final decision. Is technology mature enough for the United States to field weapons that can independently identify and strike targets?
So I actually would push back on that characterization. If you go to the 1980s and you saw how our ships were equipped with kind of like the near-range guns that would take out incoming attack objects, those even then had computers in control of the last mile because a person would not be fast enough to see something coming in a battle and move the gun and take it out. So even for 40 years we've had systems that are controlled by various levels of machine learning, right? And so do I think AI is sophisticated enough that it should be managing an entire battlefield and deciding where to attack and how to attack? No, I think that's ridiculous. I think humans should be in charge and in control of all of these things. But when you think of it, you set these things up. The way we will do it in war is you play war games. And so if you had a war game and we have, you know, a thousand of different vessels with our naval vessels over here and we have, you know, whatever adversary over here with a bunch of their stuff and you're going to fight. You can do the war game and you can see, well, you probably do need to give at least some amount of autonomy in this game to some of these systems that you've defined during a battle, otherwise you just lose. So I think these things are very empirical. It's not do we decide ahead of time what our morals are and then just lose the battle. It's you should do it in the war games. You should be testing it out and it should be dynamic based on the technology and the safety and that's something you test and learn and the answer is going to change every year how much you're willing to give to what systems during what types of battles. And do we have to be extraordinarily careful about this? Of course we do. But it doesn't mean you just lose the war game because one side uses something your side doesn't. That's stupid. That's not how war works.
Right. I mean, one of the instances which really got people concerned about this issue was the striking on the Iranian school earlier this year in the city of Marib that killed 175 children and teachers. And the investigations pointed to failures in targeting process. You know, who should be held accountable when a system selects the wrong target? And where do you personally draw the line between removing humans from lethal decisions?
So I think the people in charge in war should be deciding, you know, both ahead of time and in real time what the decision's going to be, what they're going to trust, how they're going to do it. And ultimately there's always a person responsible who is in charge of whatever system that they studied and worked on and approved. And a war is a horrible thing. And there's much worse things than that that happen in war. That's not the worst thing that can possibly happen is hurting children. It's not clear to me that the IRGC, which has killed tens of thousands of its people, didn't purposely disguise some of these things to make them look more like targets the same way the Palestinians and others do. And which is a horrible thing to do, but I understand why they do it. They're getting global sympathy by getting us to hit things. And so, it's very unclear to me the facts of exactly what happened. Obviously, it was terrible what happened to those children. And you do hold people responsible, but it could be the case that somebody made 99 really good choices and one bad choice, and it led to a horrible thing. And so, it's very easy from the outside to judge these things when you're not there in the fog of war dealing with this.
Just on American competition, you know, Ukraine is operating, you know, on the battlefield, learning, iterating all the time, and it's becoming incredibly advanced with the use of drones and new warfare techniques. How can the US keep up when it doesn't have that, you know, thank goodness, not at that war that they're fighting year after year and being able to iterate? With your companies, how do they keep up and compete with the Ukrainians?
Well, I think Ukraine's more of an ally, first of all, than someone we're competing with. If you look at what happened as soon as the war started in Ukraine, Alex Karp, my co-founder of Palantir, was the first Western defense leader on the ground right away, taking personal risk to help them. Actually, it was the UK that originally gave some of the Palantir systems with Boris Johnson to Ukraine, and the US followed up doing so in the Biden administration. And so, both Palantir and Anduril, I think was one of the fast followers. They've been very involved and very involved in working with a lot of Ukrainian technology. You know, I personally have gotten to know quite a few of the entrepreneurs over there. You're right, it's very impressive what you can learn, iterating very quickly, and being forced to figure these problems out. It's a horrible thing they've gone through, but they have some very impressive people who've stepped up. And you know, it's really fascinating how their defense department works there because they'll give different budgets, different amounts of money to multiple different places, and depending who's outperforming, they'll get more budget. And it's just a constant competition, which by the way, ours should work more that way in general. There's a definite need to be more accountable because there are limited resources. And so, yes, we are partnering very closely with them. Our companies are working with a lot of their companies. A lot of our companies are likely to buy some of the companies and things that happen over there. That's a good thing for the West. It strengthens the West.
Mhm. A lot of the people here I'm watching are investors. Where are the biggest opportunities in AI, you know, defense or otherwise that you think people need to be looking at and leaning into over the next 5 years?
Well, I mean AI is, I think it represents an industrial revolution that's very similar but even faster than the second industrial revolution, right? It was the late 19th century. And in that period it took about 30 years to roll out a whole suite of new technologies that actually, you know, doubled the average wealth of everyone in the country. I think it's going to be even faster and more dramatic this time the next 20, 30 years. I think the key area to look at is productivity. I mean you need to be thinking about how is what you're doing increasing the productivity of the economy, increasing the productivity of the sector you're working in. And I'm seeing dozens of things that are doubling, tripling or more productivity of major areas of the economy. And that's the only way that you get wealthy. That's how economics works is you have to have higher productivity. So, I'd be looking at that first of all. I think the defense stuff, listen, defense is really important. We want America to be strong, but I think the thing that's most exciting about all this defense stuff is that it's bringing back advanced manufacturing to the US and it's putting some of our greatest minds on figuring out how to do advanced manufacturing at scale. And I think if we look back in 10 or 15 years, it's not going to be all the missiles we built or all of the advanced radars or whatever else we built. It's going to be the fact that we can now, you know, manufacture things for homes, manufacture things for US infrastructure, manufacture things for our businesses in the US. And I think we can bring that manufacturing and a lot of jobs with it back to the US. That's a much, much bigger way that I care a lot more about for our country the next couple decades. And I think that's something to be looking at is what else can we be building here with these lessons.
We're also here to talk about American leadership. You're a very influential leader on many American defense issues. If the White House called you with an offer for a senior Pentagon position, would you consider it?
Oh god. This rumor's been going around for a few months, but no, I have six little kids here in Austin, and we're building a university and a policy group that's doing great work, and I have all these companies and so I listen to... Obviously, if a president calls you and asks something of you, you should consider it if a president asks you, but my focus right now is on building my businesses and my community here.
Fair enough. We've got a lot of... I've got a lot more questions, but let's take some of the audience questions. I recall there was one, it may have gone already, about space and whether... I'm interested in your view there, whether you think space is, you know, a big area now for defense and investment.
Yes, well, it's both. Space, I think it's similar to what I said earlier where I think actually a lot of the money that goes into space, even today, is because of things for defense. It's one of those battlegrounds where you have to basically be better than the enemy, otherwise it's very, very scary, and I think the US is doing a lot of, I guess mostly confidential, very smart things there. They're very bold. It's critical for warfare. It's a huge advantage to the US chiefly because of Elon Musk. People don't realize like how much this is an advantage that lets me sleep at night a lot better that we're way ahead of our adversaries there. And we use it in all sorts of things. Now that said, I think similar to the other stuff, I think ultimately the space will be much bigger from things that are not defense, and there's a lot that's going to happen there. Obviously, data centers in space is an obvious one. There's certain types of manufacturing we're going to move to space. I mean the Google guys were talking about for 20 years. It sounded kooky to me 20 years ago. I think they were totally right. It's like you have our earth be like this environmental preserve and you do more dirty things in space. And you know, there's huge parts of the economy going up there.
