Project Pilot: Can AI models fly drones?

This post introduces Project Pilot and the Drone-Bench benchmark, evaluating AI models' ability to autonomously control a drone for a locate-and-follow surveillance task. It details the decomposition of the task into five sub-tasks: Reconstruct, Localize, Navigate, Detect, and Follow. The post presents evaluation results for various models, highlighting Claude Fable 5's performance and its specific failure in the reconstruction sub-task. It also discusses the importance of consistency in model performance and the implications of AI's increasing capability in hardware operation for both opportunities and risks, drawing parallels to agentic coding.