One afternoon in late November, I visited a weapons test site in the foothills east of San Clemente, California operated by Anduril, a maker of AI-powered drones and missiles that recently announced a partnership with OpenAI. I went there to witness a new system it’s expanding today, which allows external parties to tap into its software and share data in order to speed up decision-making on the battlefield. If it works as planned over the course of a new three-year contract with the Pentagon, it could embed AI more deeply than ever before into the theater of war.  Near the […]

This story originally appeared in The Algorithm, our weekly newsletter on AI. To get stories like this in your inbox first, sign up here. The AI sector is plagued by a lack of competition and a lot of deceit—or at least that’s one way to interpret the latest flurry of actions taken in Washington.  Last Thursday, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Eric Schmitt introduced a bill aimed at stirring up more competition for Pentagon contracts awarded in AI and cloud computing. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle currently dominate those contracts. “The way that the big get bigger in AI is by […]

Machine-learning models can make mistakes and be difficult to use, so scientists have developed explanation methods to help users understand when and how they should trust a model’s predictions. These explanations are often complex, however, perhaps containing information about hundreds of model features. And they are sometimes presented as multifaceted visualizations that can be difficult for users who lack machine-learning expertise to fully comprehend. To help people make sense of AI explanations, MIT researchers used large language models (LLMs) to transform plot-based explanations into plain language. They developed a two-part system that converts a machine-learning explanation into a paragraph of […]