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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   17446 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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To make drones properly lethal you need meshed swarm coordination, ability to create and adjust tactics on the fly, without much centralization in conditions of severe jamming. So they do have incentive to cram as big models as possible in as limited hardware.

Wow my field has made it onto TheMotte, spooky. It's not quite so simple as big LLM models on limited hardware. There are a lot of networking problems on swarm interfacing if you want something that is truly adaptable. A lot of swarm robotics is essentially "dumb" control algorithms with software permutations, because LLM-agent hallucinations are rough + LLM sizes require truly monstrous hardware on drones. There's work on fitting them to Jetson Orin Nanos' but it's a slog just from the amount of compute needed + performance of smaller quantized models etc.

I can only assume that you haven't of the Vogons.

This is generally a case against the LLM + Drone combination, too much extra stuff not needed. Part of the problem with current AI research is that it is all in on LLMs but the branch off of not-LLMs but with LLM-like capabilities for reasoning for tactics or strategy are not there. If you want the reasoning you get poetry on your drone too. It actually goes beyond mesh networks as well, as a mesh network is every node connected to every node. You actually want localized connection networks that do multi-hop message passing. Much more resistant to jamming.

Idk maybe I should write an effort over-post on drone swarms, I love this subject.

maybe I should write an effort over-post on drone swarms, I love this subject.

raises paw Interested!

Idk maybe I should write an effort over-post on drone swarms, I love this subject.

I'd love to read it, if you ever do.

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