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Comment by aussieguy1234 | Hacker News Reader

Seeing some of the examples of these SAM models, I am concerned about the possibility that some military/militant group might use them to build an unjammable guided weapon (i.e. killer drone or missile). Given these models ability to apparently track objects in real time, its probably not much of a stretch to convert that into coordinates?.

Hopefully by that time there will be better defences against this type of thing, maybe a SAM powered anti-drone/anti-missile system.

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>track objects in real time

Drone maybe but you underestimate the speed of a rocket.

Also computation power adds payload weight or makes your system dependent on a server side comms link.

I am not sure what the solution is but restricting these models away from open source usually just means denying access to the public, while bad actors will still find a way to use it or discover it (with just slightly more effort).

you dont need SAM for that. These systemw already exists in Ukraine.

But, how expensive are these systems? That is, the ones not vulnerable to jamming that can guide themselves independently of the operator, even if the signal is lost?

These systems already exists in Ukraine, and no, they are not expensive.

Simply running SAM would already be more expensive.

very cheap. The computer vision part is pretty basic. It is just a camera and software that runs simple object detection algos (that we had for years) that can identify tanks, trucks, soldiers, etc.

But you could use it for that and would most likely get SotA results with it.

There are plenty of Nvidia Jetson boards in the ukrainian skies these days. Not necessarily for SAM but for other signal processing and CV tasks.

yea, but why? If existing CV works what does SAM add? You just need to spot the tank. You dont need to perfectly outline it. It is enough to just identify it.

It's not that different in defence. SAM2 might be more robust in some cases.

Not everything is just a guided bomb. Sometimes you might want to count and track objects over time.

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