// MIT TECH REVIEW — INTELLIGENZA ARTIFICIALE
The Download: selling battlefield drone data and AI reshaping language
Plus: OpenAI has launched Astra, its most capable model yet.
This is today's edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what's going on in the world of technology.
—Cory Alpert, a researcher at the University of Melbourne studying AI's impact on democracy, who previously served in the Biden White House.
Battlefields in Ukraine are littered with the remnants of drones. But behind all that wreckage, there’s a new gold mine for the defense sector: the data those drones generate.
Ukraine has begun making millions of data points gathered during tens of thousands of drone flights available to military contractors and commercial companies. It’s a quick way to attract funding and partnerships, but it turns the front line into a model training site, using the chaos of war to create conditions that AI companies struggle to reproduce.
As this new industry takes shape, we need a regulatory system that ensures battlefield data isn’t treated like ordinary commercial material.
Read the full op-ed on why battlefield data needs new rules.
—“Mother Tongue” is a short fiction story by author and AI ethicist Jenny Williams
“Daddy?” Theo curled against my side in bed. “Where do words go when they die?
“Well, kiddo,” I said, scratching my beard. “Words aren’t really alive to begin with. Not like you and I are alive.”Inside, Theo’s AI companion teaches him strange songs in a language his father doesn’t understand. But outside, the world is edging toward disaster. A mysterious agentic system called Tingsu has emerged in a nuclear-armed country, and no one seems to understand what it wants.