AI Defeats Air Force Pilot In Head-To-Head Competition, But The Fight Was On The AI's Terms

Heron Systems fielded an artificial intelligence system that managed Thursday to not only outgun a top current U.S. Air Force fighter pilot and weapons school graduate, but to score a flawless victory against its human opponent, winning all five dogfighting engagements in the culmination of a two-year Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency competition. "It's a giant leap," said Lt. Col. Justin "Glock" Mock, another weapons school graduate who also co-hosted the livestream. The DARPA program, known as the AlphaDogfight Trials, was designed to "demonstrate the feasibility of developing effective, intelligent autonomous agents capable of defeating adversary aircraft in a dogfight." In other words, if this were the movie Top Gun, Maverick and Goose would have just been smoked by an unmanned drone in head-to-head combat, five times in a row. Perhaps most impressive is the timeline under which teams rapidly developed their systems.