They create an artificial intelligence capable of thinking like a human baby

Since its creation, artificial intelligence has taken steps that have placed it far ahead of other technologies, especially when it comes to processing huge amounts of data.

However, as sophisticated as it may be, there are still aspects of artificial intelligence that need to be refined.

One of them is related to intuition, which manifests itself in the human being from an early stage. So, in a situation where one object passes behind another, a baby may instinctively know that it shouldn’t disappear and appear somewhere else. If this happened, the infant would show an expression of surprise on her face.

However, this continuity rule, along with other basic physical lawsare something that artificial intelligence has not yet been able to acquire.

Recently, a new study focused on how babies learn was released, creating an artificial intelligence called PLATO (Physics Learning Through Auto Encoding and Tracking Objects), which has been endowed with functions that allow it to replicate the way of thinking of a baby

The training of this AI was carried out from scrambled videosdesigned to emulate the level of knowledge of a baby during its first months of life.

According to Luis Piloto, a neuroscientist and member of the DeepMind AI research lab in the UK, there are three key concepts that the human being understands being a baby:

• permanence implied in the fact that objects do not suddenly disappear
• Solidity implied in the fact that a solid object does not pass through another
• Continuity implied by the fact that objects move consistently in space and time

All of these concepts were implemented in the dataset constructed by the researchers together with that of the immutability and directional inertia.

Subsequently, videos that reflected these concepts were used to train PLATO and then put it to the test with other videos that showed situations that broke the principles of the aforementioned concepts.

In that sense, PLATO was able to express surprise within his reach as an AI, so he had sensed that what had happened broke the laws of physics.

In other tests carried out with objects different from the data used in the PLATO training, it seemed to show the necessary understanding to determine what should or should not happenthus highlighting the potential of this AI to learn and acquire basic training knowledge.

Still, PLATO required some built-in knowledge to unravel the full picture. This means that more work by scientists is still necessary to understand the mental dynamics of babies regarding the concepts mentioned above until AI can fully adopt them.