Researchers are creating an AI system that can explain its decisions, amid the intense US-China AI arms race.
While China was still engaging in real-sky combat between human-controlled and AI-controlled drones, US test pilots had already taken their dogfighting AI to the skies for trials.But while it is unclear whether America has also solved the same AI hurdle in its new that China says it has, the groundbreaking work by the Chinese is certain to change the face of air battles in the future.Prevailing AI technologies, such as deep reinforcement learning and large language models, operate like a black box: tasks enter one end and results emerge from the other, while humans are left in the dark about the inner workings.But air combat is a matter of life and death. In contrast, the conventional “black box” AI can only achieve a 90 per cent win rate after 50,000 rounds and struggles to improve further.Currently, Zhang’s team has only applied the technology to ground simulators, but future applications would be “extended to more realistic air combat environments,” they wrote in a peer-reviewed paper published in the Chinese academic journal, Acta Aeronautica et Astronautica Sinica, on April 12.America’s dogfighting trials are being run between the air force and the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency ().
