OpenAI's Agents, Thinking Drones, & More

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THEWHITEBOX

TLDR;

This week, we look at OpenAI’s new agent products, reasoning drones, Canada’s AI champion, OpenAI’s attacks on DeepSeek, and Google’s amazing native image generation, among other stuff.

Enjoy!

WARFARE

Thinking Drones, What Could go Wrong?

Russian scientists have developed thinking drones, the first real attempt to equip drones with powerful artificial intelligence. They combine them with reasoning and vision models.

The robot can handle tasks such as "fly through the gate with the number equal to 2+2," while the AIs handle the instructions and actions.

With the arrival of “intelligent” drones, what could go wrong?

TheWhiteBox’s takeaway:

I don’t think ‘surprising’ best describes this news; it was something everyone knew was coming. While this type of research is necessary for progress, it is not practical for now.

The AI models used in the research combine for 14 billion parameters or 28 GB of memory at FP16 precision (the most common precision size for model parameters). That means that the drone, unless we want it to be connected to a cloud environment (bad latency guaranteed), has to carry the GPU cores and the HBM memory on the drone, making them heavier, less agile, and, importantly, much more expensive.

HBMe memory, the state-of-the-art RAM memory for AI workloads, costs around $110/GB, meaning that the piece alone costs $3k, severely increasing the ASP (average selling price) of products that, due to intense Chinese pressures, should be extremely cheap. I’m only speculating, but maybe the cloud could be brought into the drones, meaning that the AI servers storing the GPUs could be deployed into the battlefield, too. The issue is that if those servers are compromised, the drones lose their entire AI capabilities instantly.

Therefore, I’m pretty sure the goal is to build AI hardware into the drone. Now, let’s face reality. I’m a research freak, but we need to acknowledge that one thing is to develop something, and another is to make it economically viable.

Either way, reasoning drones are definitely coming, as it is a great way to allow these drones to be controlled via language. However, I’m not convinced of the unit economics at the moment.

AGENTS

We Need to Talk About MCP

While OpenAI’s release below is undoubtedly the trend of the week (more on that below), the Model Context Protocol, or MCP, developed by Anthropic, is going extremely viral. This video, which uses an LLM to create 3D renders, showcases its powers incredibly well.

But what is MCP?

Put, MCP is a communication/action protocol for LLMs to use tools on the Internet. It exposes tools and information from other software to the LLM in a standardized form.

But why do we need this if we already have APIs, interfaces that do the exact same thing (more on that in the OpenAI story below). Well, the key term here is standardized.

In an MCP-based communication system, the agent acts like a ‘client’, a software connected to one or more MCP ‘servers’. Therefore, if a software…

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