Enlarge (credit: Anthropic) On Tuesday, Anthropic introduced Claude, a large language model (LLM) that can generate text, write code, and function as an AI assistant similar to ChatGPT.

Researchers from Facebook have built a highly efficient piece of artificial intelligence (AI), programmed to slaughter anything in its path. A team from the social network blasted its way to glory this week in a contest to build programs capable of autonomously playing the classic first-person shooter game. Called VizDoom, it's an irreverent test of skill for AI researchers, focused on eight-player deathmatches. Think your software is smart? AI, of wildly varying levels of sophistication, has been in games since the earliest days of the medium.

Today's malicious hackers have an average of 312 days to exploit "zero-day" computer software flaws before human cybersecurity experts can find and fix those flaws. The U.S. military's main research agency focused on disruptive technologies aims to see whether artificial intelligence can do a better job of finding and fixing such exploits within a matter of seconds or minutes. This summer, seven finalist teams in the Cyber Grand Challenge the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will do battle with AI systems that can autonomously scan rivals' network servers for exploits and protect their own servers by actively finding and fixing software flaws. The immediate rewards comes in the form of a US 2 million prize for first place, 1 million for second place, and 750,000 for third place. But in the long run, DARPA hopes the challenge results will prove autonomous AI systems have become capable enough to help humans in the never ending struggle to protect computer software and networks.