It's materially different than "Generative AI" which is the current trend of AI hype, which is what I think the "AI" in the title is referring to.

> The Pentagon has also struggled to find software that can successfully control large numbers of drones, made by different companies, working in coordination to find and potentially strike a target—a key to making the Replicator vision work.

So the software can't work with arbitrary drones. The article also talks about the high cost of some of the drones.

> Of the dozen or so autonomous systems acquired for Replicator, three were unfinished or existed only as a concept at the time they were selected, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Among Replicator’s shortcomings, officials said, is that the Defense Innovation Unit was directed to buy drones that had older technology, and it didn’t rigorously test platforms and software before acquiring them, other people familiar with the matter said.

So the military bought promises and basically funded some research. That's fine imo, they do that all the time, but their expectations did not align with results in these cases. And they didn't set good requirements for the platforms.

I expect the hopes for AI-driven drones with the ability to target individual humans by identity is probably not quite here yet. You have to get around jamming, fit any tech on a small platform, and it has to be cheap and disposable. And you don't actually want "AI", because you don't want it to mistakenly kill civilians, you want highly accurate computer vision.

In Russia and Ukraine, they are manually piloting drones that are attached by fiberoptic cable. It's cheap and effective, but requires a human pilot. At least for now, I would guess this is a much more effective (in results and cost) way to go. A human can pilot dozens of disposable drones in a day that drop their payload and are then discarded.

https://youtu.be/bZe5J8SVCYQ

(Origin works for me as well.)

Call me an idealist, but I think the priority in this conflict should be their sovereignty and the well being of the people over there. Otherwise it's just weird.

A clear example is NATO’s struggle to respond to Russian drone incursions. Recently, over 20 drones were launched into Polish airspace—yet only four were intercepted, at a cost of millions of dollars. The remainder crashed across Polish territory, highlighting serious gaps in air defense systems.

there is literally nobody in America who nurses that type of pride, quite the opposite, Americans have been unusually open to integrating foreign ideas from the beginning.

I like to think that there is core of career public servants inside the US government who take their jobs seriously and they perform it well. Whether decision makers take their inputs into account is a different matter.