Commercial viability can be the biggest enemy of emerging technologies. It takes years for novel, capex-intensive innovations to build a big enough market to survive in.
Historically, therefore, many entrepreneurs have found that there are few better customers of innovation than the military.
Take semiconductors. Microchips are ubiquitous now in countless consumer and business-facing industries. But long before every new car, phone or washing machine needed dozens of microchips, the industry’s pioneers funded their early research through lucrative contracts with the Pentagon.
Similar patterns can be seen in technologies as varied as microwaves, touch screens and superglue.
AI – or AI in the modern post-ChatGPT understanding – is a little different. Entrepreneurs at the frontier of the industry haven’t struggled to pull in vast investments from the private sector and there are thousands of businesses globally incorporating the technology into their services. ...