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- 🤖 Can We Teach AI to Be Like Humans?
Good morning and welcome to the latest edition of neonpulse!
In today’s issue, we’re talking about AI’s ability to be like humans. Because it might have just gotten closer to completely mimic human behavior…
Can We Teach AI to Be Like Humans?
There’s no doubt about it: AI has amazed us all with its ability to imitate human actions, from playing games to generating text. But there's the catch: AI lacks the ability to think like humans, which can lead to unexpected blunders in unfamiliar situations.
Scientists at the University of British Columbia and Vector Institute are working on a game-changing solution called "Thought Cloning" that teaches AI systems to think like humans.
But the question is: can we teach AI to actually be like humans?
When AI systems are trained using behavior cloning, they learn to mimic human actions by analyzing datasets generated by people. For example: they might study a chess game or observe tasks being completed in a warehouse. They learn what actions are taken in what situations, and learn to mimic these when they encounter similar situations.
Although these systems can replicate human behavior on specific tasks, they lack the reasoning behind those actions. This means they struggle to adapt to new situations and require extensive training on every possible scenario, making them unreliable in unpredictable circumstances.
Thought cloning flips the script by training AI models on both actions and thoughts simultaneously. By exposing the models to a stream of actions and their corresponding explanations, the models learn the associations between behavior and goals. They can then generate and communicate the reasoning behind their actions.
This approach brings several benefits:
AI models learn faster since they need fewer examples to understand why certain actions matter.
They perform better by applying the same reasoning to new situations.
They improve safety by explaining the reasoning behind each action, helping to prevent harmful behavior.
To implement thought cloning, researchers developed a deep learning architecture with two components. The "upper component" processes thoughts and environment observations to predict the next thought, while the "lower component" receives the environment observations and the output from the upper component to predict the correct action.
During training, the model has access to the thoughts and actions generated by humans. It adjusts its parameters based on this information to minimize the loss in thought and action predictions. The goal is for the trained model to generate the right sequence of thoughts and actions for unseen tasks.
To test their approach, the researchers used a platform called BabyAI, where an AI agent completes various missions in a grid world. They created a dataset of one million scenarios to train their thought-cloning model.
The results were impressive. Thought cloning outperformed behavior cloning, converging faster and requiring fewer training examples to handle unseen tasks. It also excelled in out-of-distribution examples, where tasks differed significantly from the model's training examples.
Thought cloning improves interpretability of AI behavior, enabling researchers to understand actions and address errors. It also introduces Precrime Intervention, detecting and preventing risky behavior effectively. However, challenges arise with the simplicity of the BabyAI environment compared to the complexity of real-world scenarios.
Creating training data is also problematic as human actions often rely on implicit knowledge. Using YouTube videos for explanations helps, but capturing implicit reasons in plain text remains a challenge.
As thought cloning progresses, it opens new avenues for research in artificial general intelligence, AI safety, and interpretability. While its performance on large-scale and complex problems remains to be seen, thought cloning brings us closer to unlocking the potential of AI to reason more and more like humans…
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And now your moment of zen
 Harry Potter |  Lord of the Rings |
 The Matrix |  The Shining |
More: Movies as 16-bit video games.
That’s all for today folks!
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