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Lightcone · 2 min · Jun 18, 2025

Thunder Forge aims to cut military planning cycles to 10 minutes

Scale and Indo-Pacific Command are converting doctrine-based military planning into agent workflows. Alexandr Wang says decision cycles can shrink from 72 hours to 10 minutes.

Alexandr Wang

Alexandr Wang is CEO of Scale AI.

Dropped out of MIT to co-found Scale AI in 2016; Meta invested $14.3B in it in 2025 and hired him to lead Superintelligence Labs.

  • Garry Tan, Host · President & CEO, Y Combinator

    Co-founded Posterous and Initialized Capital, an early Coinbase backer.

  • Harj Taggar, Host · Managing partner, Y Combinator

    Co-founded Auctomatic with the Collison brothers and later Triplebyte.

  • Diana Hu, Host · Managing partner, Y Combinator

    CTO of Escher Reality; after Niantic bought it, ran AR for Pokémon GO.

  • Jared Friedman, Host · Managing partner, Y Combinator

    Co-founded Scribd, which YC funded in 2006; has advised 20+ YC unicorns.

About this segment

Scale and Indo-Pacific Command are converting doctrine-based military planning into agent workflows. Alexandr Wang says decision cycles can shrink from 72 hours to 10 minutes.

From “Alexandr Wang: Building Scale AI, Transforming Work With Agents & Competing With China”, Jun 18, 2025. Watch the full episode

Answers “Are AI agents ready for real work?” See all 50 answers

Takeaways

  1. Thunder Forge is a DOD AI planning program with Indo-Pacific Command.
  2. It turns an established military planning process into agent workflows.
  3. Wang says decision cycles can fall from 72 hours to 10 minutes.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 27:44Scale moved from narrow data markets into AI applications5:34
  2. 37:32Repetitive workflows can become agent environments3:33
  3. 47:58Wang sees data and know-how as China’s AI advantages4:10
  4. 7:22Scale chose self-driving despite concerns about market size2:48
  5. 16:00A firm's specialized model could become its core IP3:18

  6. 53:43Thunder Forge aims to cut military planning cycles to 10 minutes2:26

  7. 42:00Humanity’s Last Exam uses problems from active researchers5:48Up next
  8. 19:12Humans will keep managing agents and handling failures6:41

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 53:48

    towards uh agentic warfare or agentic defense which is basically you know if you if you actually mapped out the what warfare looks like today or like what like the um you know the actual process of a conflict um you know if you look at russia ukraine or other conflict other conflict areas like the decision-making processes are driven are remarkably manual and human driven and it's just like all these just all these like very critical battle time decisions are made like with very limited information unfortunately um uh in these like very manual workflows and so it's very clear that that um if you used ai agents you would have perfect information and you would have uh immediate decision-making. And so we're going to see this huge shift towards agent-driven warfare and agent-driven conflict. And it has the potential of turning these conflicts

  2. 54:45

    into these almost incomprehensibly fast-moving kinds of scenarios. And that's something that you guys are actively working on, right? Is there anything that you can talk about? I assume some of it is classified, but... Yeah. So one of the things we're doing is we're building this system called Thunder Forge with the Indo-Pacific Command out in Hawaii. It's responsible for the sort of the Indo-Pacific region. And it is the flagship DOD program for using AI for military planning and operations.

  3. 55:17

    So we're basically doing exactly what I said. We are we take the existing human workflow. The military works in what's called a doctrinal way or they're sort of like governed by the doctrine of this, like, you know, very established military planning process. and you just convert that into you know a series of agents that work together um and and conduct you know the exact same task but it's just like all agent driven and then all of a sudden you you turn these like um very critical decision making cycles from you know 72 hours to 10 minutes and it kind of like changes it from um you know you know when you play chess if you play chess versus a human they just spend all this time thinking um you know you you know it's sort of this like slow game.

  4. 56:00

    Play chess against a computer. It's just like these immediate moves back. And it's like this sort of like unrelenting form of warfare.