AI and the Future of Warfare with US Under Secretary of War Emil Michael

**Emil Michael** (0:00)
The military buildup in China is the biggest military buildup in world history. And so there's a real urgency on our side to ensure that we are ahead, but we stay ahead. And that's gonna take a different level of investment and different type of thinking than we've had in the last 20 years. In the 80s, there were 50 defense contractors, and they got merged, so there were only about five. There's a lot of room for new entrants. It's crazy to me that SpaceX and Andral and Palantir all had to sue the Department of War for their first contract. So the idea is, you don't have to sue anymore. Come through the front door, because people are not going to fight you. We're now excited about lower cost, faster, more sophisticated options.

**Sarah Guo** (0:39)
Hi, listeners. Welcome back to No Priors. We're here today with Emil Michael, the former Chief Business Officer of Uber, White House Fellow, and currently CTO of the Department of War.

**Elad Gil** (0:50)
Emil, thanks for joining us. Welcome to No Priors.

**Emil Michael** (0:53)
Good to see you guys. It's been a long time.

**Elad Gil** (0:55)
Congratulations on the new role. Very exciting news. Could you describe a little bit more about what that role is and what's changed at the Department of War to sort of create this new role, this new momentum, new initiatives that you all are focused on?

**Emil Michael** (1:08)
Yeah. So for a long time at the Department of War, there was one organization called Acquisition Technology and Logistics. It was all bunched up into one thing. And then about eight years ago, they said, Well, tech is moving faster on new kinds of weaponry and defense systems than on the old system. So we're going to split out acquisition from research and engineering, they call it. So I'm the Undersecretary for Research and Engineering, which is cool, right? Because I get to work on the stuff that I used to work on when I was in Silicon Valley, like with work with entrepreneurs, work with new companies. I'm now responsible for DARPA, which is obviously super cool because it's most some of the most advanced research that happens in the country, if not the world. In the last few months, I took over as the Chief AI Office in the Department of War, which were three million employees, the biggest organization with the biggest budget in the world, is not a small thing to think about how to do AI right for. And then the Defense Innovation Unit, which is actually based in Mountain View, and it's supposed to be the link between the defense industry and the startup community that's building commercial products and may have dual use. And then last is the Strategic Capability Office, which takes kind of existing systems and tries to modify them in strategic ways or supplement them to get, you know, for strategic surprise, they call it. So all that all has technology underneath it. And the idea is to unify that across the department, because we spend $150 billion a year on tech. In one way or another. So you want to avoid duplication. You want to bring things to market faster. So that was a big announcement yesterday by the secretary at Starbase.

**Elad Gil** (2:59)
You mentioned DIU has been involved with providing early funding to a variety of promising new defense tech and hardware companies. Could you tell us a little bit more about what they've done and how you've approached that so far?

**Emil Michael** (3:10)
Yeah, DIU has had some good success with Seronic and a bunch of other companies. And now it's time to do more of it, so it's more of a focus. And yeah, DARPA has just invented the internet. You go to their gift shop and they have a napkin where someone drew out the internet sort of architecture. And they sell that in the gift shop in case you guys come to DC. We can get you some of those.

**Sarah Guo** (3:36)
This is like a, I mean, it's an amazing unification of a bunch of stuff that's clearly important to America and to global security. It's a very different environment than Elad and I have seen you in the past, right? You've worked with technology companies and even within them as a leader had this reputation for being high speed, aggressive deal maker, if I'm allowed to say that. How does that work with the Department of War, which like amazing impact importance and scale, not the strongest reputation in previous decades and administrations for speed?

**Emil Michael** (4:16)
Yeah. Well, I mean, hopefully part of the reason I got chosen for the job and certainly the reason I took it is to inject some of that urgency speed, being a little bit impervious to barriers and trying to run them over as opposed to being stopped by them.