This advanced neural network can explain its thought process (finally)

The type of artificial intelligence known as a neural network can be trained to complete tasks once thought to be exclusive to humans, such as driving a car, creating visual art, or composing a heavy metal album. But neural networks have a big problem: they're really complicated. They're so complex, in fact, that researchers have often struggled to explain precisely why they make specific decisions. Now, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) say they've created a neural network that can explain the steps it took to solve a problem -- an advance that could help us better understand how the technology works and alleviate safety concerns in riskier applications, like self-driving cars. The new algorithm, called the Transparency by Design Network (TbD-net), breaks down the process of recognizing an image into subtasks.