Scene: A U.S. adversary is at work on a new type of drone, ship, or aircraft and it's your job to find it, wherever it is. Not long ago, that task would take a massive effort of human, signals, and open-source intelligence collection. But a researcher from AI company Synthetaic has created a tool that will allow users to find virtually any large object that exists in any satellite photo of the Earth within just one day. It's also the sort of capability the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is also looking to develop, and it could radically shift strategic advantage on the battlefield. Corey Jaskolski, founder and CEO of Synthetaic, dubbed his satellite image scanning tool Rapid Automatic Image Categorization, or RAIC.

Earlier this month, entrepreneur Corey Jaskolski pulled out a pen and drew his best guess at what the surveillance balloon shot down by a US jet would have looked like from space. Then he fed the sketch and "a gob" of recent satellite images from the area where the balloon was taken down into algorithms developed by his image and video detection startup Synthetatic, and waited. Within two minutes, he says, the algorithms found the 200-foot-tall balloon off the coast of South Carolina. "I couldn't believe it," Jaskolski says. Nor could his wife when he excitedly showed her his results.