The city of San Sebastián, in Spain’s Basque region, is a relaxed surfers’ haven that feels a world removed from any war. Yet atop a pine-forested hill overlooking the city, engineers in a conference room at Multiverse Computing are training their focus on combat of the kind raging at the other end of Europe, in Ukraine. They’re demonstrating one of their latest creations: a small AI model designed to help drones communicate from high above a chaotic battlefield.
On a laptop, the engineers demonstrate how a drone can pinpoint precisely what is in its sights. Using the ordinary workhorse computer processors known as CPUs, the device can identify encroaching enemy tanks and soldiers, for example, and zip only that information back to military units, using a compressed AI model that’s vastly cheaper and more energy-efficient than the behemoth large language models that power chatbots like ChatGPT. “You need an AI system that is super-frugal,” says Enrique Lizaso Olmos, Multiverse’s CEO and one of four cofounders, as the program quickly picks out a tank. “The drones use very, very, very little energy,” he adds, even when monitoring a situation that “is getting more and more complex.”
