Russia’s Smartest Weapon May Have An American Brain
While Russian military hardware has been underperforming throughout its current conflict with Ukraine, one weapon that has been performing dangerously well is the Lancet-3M loitering munition, and it seems to be powered (in part) by U.S. components. Recent images of a crashed Lancet show what looks like a U.S.-made NVIDIA Jetson TX2 single-board computer and an AMD-owned Xilinx Zynq chip.
NVIDIA’s Jetson TX2 is a credit card-sized chip that has been described as, ‘the fastest, most power-efficient embedded AI computing device.’ While the AI capabilities of the Lancet are unknown, experts suspect the chip is used to autonomously identify targets for the drone operator. While unlikely, another possibility is that the chip allows for, 'a genuine ‘killer robot’ capability to independently seek and destroy targets.’