Self-Taught AI May Have a Lot in Common With the Human Brain

FOR A DECADE now, many of the most impressive artificial intelligence systems have been taught using a huge inventory of labeled data. An image might be labeled “tabby cat” or “tiger cat,” for example, to “train” an artificial neural network to correctly distinguish a tabby from a tiger. The strategy has been both spectacularly successful and woefu... See more

For researchers interested in the intersection of animal and machine intelligence, moreover, this “supervised learning” might be limited in what it can reveal about biological brains. Animals—including humans—don’t use labeled data sets to learn. For the most part, they explore the environment on their own, and in doing so, they gain a rich and rob... See more