No One Truly Knows How AI Systems Work. A New Discovery Could Change That

Today's artificial intelligence is often described as a "black box." AI developers don't write explicit rules for these systems; instead, they feed in vast quantities of data and the systems learn on their own to spot patterns. But the inner workings of the AI models remain opaque, and efforts to peer inside them to check exactly what is happening haven't progressed very far. Beneath the surface, neural networks--today's most powerful type of AI--consist of billions of artificial "neurons" represented as decimal-point numbers. Nobody truly understands what they mean, or how they work.