“Beauty is on the inside.” That’s how teachers used to console us back in school when the best-looking person won over their peers. The market used to reward physical appearance too. Remember when people used to line up in droves for the latest iPhone model?
Not so much anymore.
Instead of companies competing over physical appeal in the form of the thinnest screen or most futuristic-looking car, what increasingly gets people’s hearts racing is the intelligence layer of products. “You can think of hardware as the body and AI as the brain,” Peter Kalogiannis, CEO and co-founder of Swarm Aero, told me in an interview. “The body still matters. A plane has to fly. A sensor must collect information. But a smarter brain can make even fairly simple hardware much more useful.”
When The Intelligence Is the Product
Kalogiannis’s company offers a relevant example of this updated thinking. It builds Gamera, a large new uncrewed aircraft debuting at this week’s Air & Space Forces Association Air, Space & Cyber Conference. This follows a busy stretch for the California-based startup, including more than $10 million in Air Force Research Laboratory contracts. However, what excites Kalogiannis and others in the industry is the intelligence layer at work. “The product we’re delivering is the swarm itself: many autonomous aircraft sensing, coordinating and acting together as a unified system, under the control of a small number of human operators,” he said.
To appreciate the shift, it’s helpful to consider how military aviation used to work. Historically, if you added more aircraft to the skies, you would need more people to fly them. World War II is a prime example. It would have been inconceivable for the Allies to triumph over the Axis powers by simply spinning up more aircraft without also training more pilots. Humans were still required for air superiority.
AI and autonomy are changing that equation.
Case in point: Legion, Swarm’s command-and-control software, is designed to allow just one operator or one small team to oversee many autonomous systems at the same time. It’s not that humans disappear from the theater of war or that fighter planes will stop being physically impressive. Rather, what’s changing is the coordinated intelligence layer. Hollywood imagined a similar idea in 2019. EDITH, Tony Stark’s AI system in Spider-Man: Far From Home, enables one person to control a vast network of drones working in tandem as a lethal swarm coordinated through integrated software.
Robotics’ ‘One Brain, Multiple Forms’ Model
The world of embodied AI is recognizing the utility of the command-and-control model exemplified by Swarm. Meanwhile, a fundamental question is emerging: “Do we really need to train a dedicated ‘brain’ for every unique robot shape?” Gasgoo Autonews recently asked. “Or can we build a universal intelligence foundation that allows different ‘bodies’ to share the same ‘mind’?”
Increasingly, one answer is an approach dubbed “One brain, multiple forms.” As Gasgoo Autonews further explains, “The concept aims to let robots of different shapes share a single ‘brain’ through a unified underlying model and software architecture.”
In a similar vein, Google DeepMind’s Gemini Robotics 2 shows the benefits of coordinating not just similar robots but different types as well. “The reasoning is that no single robot fits every task. A wheeled rover suits indoor work, while a humanoid handles uneven terrain better. Robots communicate through a shared semantic understanding to hand off subtasks,” explains Marktechpost.com.
The Healthcare Parallel
Teton shows how this same idea can work in a very different field: medicine. Its hardware is far less conspicuous than a humanoid robot. What’s really exciting is again, the intelligence layer, specifically the value that comes from the sensors and AI healthcare workers use to assist patients.
“Healthcare’s future depends on breaking the link between how much care we can deliver and how many people we can hire,” said Mikkel Wad Thorsen, its CEO and co-founder, in an interview. “That starts with giving AI an understanding of the physical world: who needs help, what has changed and what needs to happen next. At Teton, unobtrusive hardware makes that possible without residents and patients having to wear or operate anything. It all happens in the background. Today, that intelligence helps staff deliver better care. Tomorrow, it will coordinate people and machines to make high-quality care radically cheaper and more abundant.”
The Future of War Is Embodied and Diffuse
So far, we have seen how an intelligence layer can support healthcare outcomes, coordinate different types of robots in different settings, and orchestrate autonomous vehicles. Now let’s zero in on how war may be managed in the coming years. In defense, as in any industry, the need for simplicity and lower costs has always driven innovation. This is especially true of how aircraft have been conceived, designed and developed since World War II.
At the same time, much ink has been spilled over the astronomical costs of producing them. “In 1979, Department of Defense (DOD) official Norman Augustine conducted a legendary study of U.S. fighter aircraft cost growth over time. He found that the unit cost of new-generation fighter aircraft has increased, on average, roughly an order of magnitude every 20 years since 1910. Augustine observed, ‘In the year 2054, the entire defense budget will purchase just one aircraft. The aircraft will have to be shared by the Air Force and Navy [three and a half] days each per week except for leap year, when it will be made available to the Marines for the extra day,’” according to CSIS.
As discussed, the Legion software system seeks to use the intelligence layer to change that cost dynamic while improving military outcomes. “Swarming large, unmanned aircraft to accomplish effects that can’t be done even with very exquisite vehicles was the core idea we founded the company around in 2022. The power of Legion is that it enables a single operator to not only manage swarms of Gamera UAS, but to also simultaneously orchestrate other multi-domain assets at sea, on land, or in the air for combined effects,” said Kalogiannis.
Looking ahead, the 20th century showed humanity what’s possible with big, powerful fighter planes that dominated the skies and our field of vision. Future innovations point to something just as compelling: coordinated aircraft working en masse, using AI to create new operational effects. As countries turn increasingly to technology to overwhelm and confuse enemy defenses, what may win tomorrow’s conflicts is not so much brawn as brain.
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