A computer scientist at DeepMind, a company owned by Google in London, named Luis Piloto, and his colleagues have made an AI that was inspired by research on how babies learn. The new artificial intelligence, called PLATO, can think like a baby.
Physics Learning through Auto-encoding and Tracking Objects is what PLATO stands for. It can learn simple physical rules about how things work and act surprised when things don’t seem to follow those rules, just like a baby.
Developmental psychologists can tell how well babies can follow the movement of objects by watching where their eyes go. Scientists can tell how surprised children are by how long they look at one spot when they show them videos of, say, a ball that suddenly disappears.
Scientists used animated videos of simple things like cubes and balls to teach PLATO. They used about 30 hours of videos of simple things like a ball rolling down a slope or two balls bouncing off each other to teach the system how to work.