I don’t know. But if you assume that the AI companies have an enterprise subscription product available to any given market sector then given their desperate need for money they will sell it to anyone and everyone. So it becomes a widely used standard feature. Having access to it doesn’t give you an edge; it puts you on the same surface as everyone else.
It’s like being an algorithmic betting exchange gambler; being the first with access to some new stream of information may give you a very temporary advantage but once everyone has access to it, the market prices it in.
If you want an advantage you have to seek it out elsewhere.
It might be in the harness or tooling, but if your cloud LLM can write it quickly for you, it’s the same for your competitors; their cloud LLM can write it for them.
The idea that using a cloud LLM is an edge — an advantage — doesn’t stand up well to scrutiny.
Lasers or anything similar like a rail gun require extraordinary amounts of power to work, and that power generates side effects like heat which strain and damage the current materials that we have and are known.
The physics change entirely when its Air to Air laser defense vs Ship to air laser defense.
There are numerous things that shift the math
1. Speed difference
The Stealth fighter is moving at mach 2
The Ship is moving at 40 mph
A fleeing stealth fighter will be able to fire at the incoming missile far longer
2. Atmospheric difference
At sea level, humidity, salt spray, and atmospheric thermal turbulence absorb beam energy, causing thermal blooming
At Sea Level: Air density is 100%. A 100 kW laser beam diverges quickly and may struggle to keep a tight focal point beyond 3 to 5 km.
At 45,000 Feet: Air density drops by 80% down to roughly 20% and water vapor is almost zero.
3. Missile types and threat profiles
The missile likely to take down a stealth fighter is a infrared air to air missile. They have glass domes that allow light and heat to enter. Thus vulnerable to getting blinded
The missile likely to take down a ship is a hypersonic antiship missile, is likely using a AESA seeker and sporting a extremely tough and heat resistant ceramic dome. You cannot blind a AESA seeker, a ship would need a hard kill and to try to burn through a missile body designed to survive the extreme heat and force of moving at hypersonic speeds at low altitudes.
The physics change entirely, it makes tons of sense from a physics standpoint to have a defensive laser on a fighter jet to defend from air to air missiles. A laser system would prevent infrared missiles from hitting your stealth jets.
While for ships it makes no sense, A laser system can't burn through a hypersonic antiship missile fast enough and will just be a waste.
And before you bring up, muh power the J-36 has 3 engines this is why the chinese put in a 3rd engine inside their 6th gen fighter, the intent of the design was always to install a defensive laser
> The Stealth fighter is moving at mach 2 The Ship is moving at 40 mph
Irrelevant, lasers move at the speed of light.
> At sea level, humidity, salt spray, and atmospheric thermal turbulence absorb beam energy, causing thermal blooming
> At Sea Level: Air density is 100%. A 100 kW laser beam diverges quickly and may struggle to keep a tight focal point beyond 3 to 5 km.
> At 45,000 Feet: Air density drops by 80% down to roughly 20% and water vapor is almost zero.
THis may all be true, but the problems of heating dynamics remain. A laser cannot requires cooling times for both plane and ship because of heat, which limits the frequency it can be used.
> The missile likely to take down a stealth fighter is a infrared air to air missile. They have glass domes that allow light and heat to enter. Thus vulnerable to getting blinded
> The missile likely to take down a ship is a hypersonic antiship missile, is likely using a AESA seeker and sporting a extremely tough and heat resistant ceramic dome. You cannot blind a AESA seeker, a ship would need a hard kill and to try to burn through a missile body designed to survive the extreme heat and force of moving at hypersonic speeds at low altitudes.
Dont tell me, tell the he navies of the world who have tried and failed to create lasers mounted on ships.
Setup number 1 = Fighter is fleeing at mach 2 from a mach 5 missile
Setup number 2 = Ship is fleeing at 40mph from a mach 5 missile
Lasers moving at the speed of light is irrelevant, what matters is the engagement time and dwell time
engagement time = time it takes missile to hit target from 10km range (estimated range of laser effectiveness)
Dwell time = How long the laser needs to shine on a target before cooking it
China's J-36 will be moving at mach 2 and blasting the missile with the defensive laser.
The ship will be doing the same. What this means is that China's J-36 will have around a 12 second window to blast the missile. The ship only has around 5 seconds before it impacts!
>THis may all be true, but the problems of heating dynamics remain. A laser cannot requires cooling times for both plane and ship because of heat, which limits the frequency it can be used.
The laser is only for defensive applications, its not going to be blasting for 10 minutes straight. It only needs around 3 seconds of dwell time to cook air to air missiles that are fired at it. The J-36 can handle this by using the heat from the laser to dump to heat into preheating its fuel.
>Dont tell me, tell the he navies of the world who have tried and failed to create lasers mounted on ships.
Because they don't work on sea - The laser is too weak, the target profile is designed to resist heat, and the engagement times are too short. While in a plane vs missile, the laser is stronger (less atmosphere and vapor), The target profile is vulnerable (Primary method to hit a stealth fighter is to use a heatseeking missile and not using a radar seeker), and engagement time is longer (Fighter is fleeing at mach 2)
Let me throw up some numbers for the 2 scenarios
1. Naval Ship vs. Inbound Hypersonic Missile
Missile: Mach 6 (1,950 m/s at sea level) carrying a UHTC ceramic matrix nose cone (2.5 cm thick) protecting an active millimeter-wave radar seeker.
Laser: 300 kW class Naval Solid-State Laser (SSL).
Engagement Envelope: Starts tracking at 15 km; laser fires at 10 km (optical line-of-sight window).
Time required to disable missile: 1.5s (tracking) + 3.8s (dwell) = 5.3 seconds
Time for Hypersonic missile to hit : 5.12 seconds
2. J-36 vs. Air to Air Missile
Missile: Mach 5 (1,475 m/s at 35,000 ft) tail-chasing the jet. Carrying a toughened Sapphire/Yttria optical dome covering a dual-band Infrared Search & Track (IRST) seeker.
Fighter Jet: J-36 fleeing at Mach 2 (590 m/s at 35,000 ft).
Laser: 100 kW class internal pulse-burst laser.
Engagement Envelope: Laser fires rearward at 10 km distance.
Time required to disable missile: 1.2s (tracking) + 1.6s (dwell) = 2.8seconds.
Total time before impact: Because the J-36 is fleeing at Mach 2, it takes the missile 11.3 seconds to catch up and hit the J-36.
Conclusion
The ship with a 300kw laser, will take 5.3 seconds to disable a hypersonic anti ship missile. The hypersonic antiship missile will take 5.12 seconds to hit the ship.
The J-36 with a 100kw laser, will take 2.8 seconds to disable a Air to Air Infrared missile. The air to air missile will take 11.3 seconds to hit the J-36.
*Adding a note the 1.6 seconds dwell is how long it takes to cook the air to air missile. But within .2 seconds it is already blinded.
So my analysis is biased
For the ship scenario the ship needs to completely cook the missile, the missile is protected by ceramics and seeing with AESA
For the J-36 scenario the missile has a glass dome and is using a heat seeker. .2 seconds of direct laser is enough to blind it and destroy detector elements.
Larger airborne lasers have been tried and failed, i.e YAL1 needed magnitude more power, but that was to intercept ICBMs shielded to survive rentry.
100 kW and 10s dwelling in atmosphere theoretically works for AA intercepts.
What's slept on is it lasers also potentially like scifi tier infinite ammo laser gun vs subsonic targets... like drones and cruise missiles. You don't have to line up gun runs (which J36 doesn't even have). The limit is basically how fast heat exchange dumps laser heat into fuel burn, but lazy llm math suggest like... multiple targets per minute with off boresight engagement - i.e. all targets within 10km cone/swath. This absolute game changer / flips economics against any budget drone precision complex adversaries.
Yeah. Let's not forget that just a year ago, those of us in tech could not conceive of developers getting replaced by AI. Things have come so far since then however that there are multiple studies showing junior developer hiring has slowed down to a crawl.
That's the big question, how prices evolve if LLMs increase supply. Standard economic theory says that prices must collapse. There is probably still a short time of 2-5 years where AI native firms can pocket in quite some arbitrage but I guess markets will eventually figure it out and prices will collapse.
This is not only for law. The same applies to all the other industries where LLMs can be used to automate work tasks.
I agree that prices will go down dramatically in occupations that primarily involve code, words, and numbers - and in general knowing the "rules". But there are so many occupations that will have to wait for AI to enter the physical realm. I also predict that the backlash will largely prevent that from occurring.
That's a problem if you live in a country with politically illiterate voters. That's why education is so important in democracies so people don't fall for such crap
Interesting question. What is work? Is playing with your children work? Is talking to elderly people work? I think a lot of things we have outsourced to "professionals" is considered work now and was considered "just normal life" before.
to me work is anything that i am obligated to do, that i can't say no to even if i'd rather do something else. (and yes, doing housework and raising kids is work, and as a society we should treat it as such. that is, we should recognize that stay at home parents are actually working and should be rewarded for doing so. same goes for caring for other people)
> It's reasonable to assume that if AI drop-in-replaced all those knowledge workers, AI companies could credibly charge somewhere in that order of magnitude, because that's what the market is already bearing.
Future supply and demand will set the price - not what is paid today. If supply by open models is vast and cheap, I can't see that the entire knowledge industry can hold the current size. It'll rather collapse to a fraction of its current value.
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