The Economist.
It's not uncommon to hear fighter jets on maneuvers
in the skies above the Baltic Sea in the northeast of Europe.
But last summer, unbeknownst to anyone who might have heard the roar overhead,
a pilot handed over the reins of their aircraft to an AI model.
The artificial intelligence system, known as Centaur,
took part in an air-to-air combat scenario that pitted its airplane against another human-piloted fighter jet.
For the first time, an AI-piloted plane executed evasive and offensive movements,
all while its enemy was beyond the typical visual range of human pilots.
That's usually some tens of kilometers.
The AI agent even suggested when it might fire weapons in the exercise.
Centaur was developed by Helsing, a European defense firm.
We developed Centaur with reinforcement learning.
James Lawson is one of Helsing's directors.
We are able to train the AI in parallel thousands of times faster than real-time.
Centaur was trained in a flight simulator.
The model was rewarded whenever it did a good job.
In a couple of days, Centaur is able to do 50 years of full-time piloting like a human.
But without any of that guidance, it just learned it through trial and error.
Each bit of feedback helped to tweak and refine its underlying neural network.