Tiny Teachers, Big Impact: What Babies Can Teach AI
The Surprising Lessons AI Can Learn from Drooling Bundles of Joy
So is AI going to be amazing and solve all your problems? Or is AI the biggest threat to humanity that will take your job and wipe you out? Or, maybe neither of those is true, and drooling babies might have the real answer to helping you understand the truth about AI? Which do you feel is more likely?
Quite the choice, isn't it.
I'll be straight with you - I'm fed up of the media bullshit and clickbait-driven AI news reporting that is more often based on fantasies designed for clicks, and based on little to no research or evidence.
The media do an appalling job of giving you a balanced and accurate understanding of AI, just when you need it most. Click-bait maybe isn’t the best way to help you really understand AI, would you agree?
It also doesn't help when attention-seeking scientists like Max Tegmark from MIT decide to go full-tilt batshit crazy and claim that 'AI is like a cancer which can kill all of humanity' with absolutely no evidence to support his delusional claims.
Tegmark often uses his scientific credibility in physics, to mislead the public and make fraudulent and false claims about a different discipline he has no expertise with, AI. It's a bit like your plumber claiming to give you trusted, expert professional financial advice.
Scientists should know better than journalists about the importance of evidence-based reasoning, but apparently, standards seem to have fallen quite dramatically at MIT as they have in the media, but I digress...
But what if, AI might not be amazing or our total extinction? What then? And what if AI was a bit amazing, but also a bit stupid? Not just one, but a bit of both? And perhaps more crucially, what does the research and evidence suggest?
I imagine nuance, complexity & subtlety are probably no good for media clickbait or deranged MIT physics professors, but could they be closer to the truth?
Some recent research has highlighted not only how many things babies can do that even the most powerful AI today cannot do, but also how babies might be some of the best teachers to help AI learn to be more like us and become more intelligent.
So could babies have more to teach AI than Professor Mad-Max Tegmark? Seems like an intriguing possibility... why don’t you join me & lets investigate…
What Babies Can Teach AI
People are amazed about what AI can do these days, and I include myself in this. Despite being an AI professional, I'm really impressed by the abilities of modern AI, that even now could replace various jobs and tasks in the workforce.
But were you also aware that despite this, the best AI still can't do things babies can do very easily? Probably not. This is a fact that doesn't quite fit with the popular AI media narratives of god-like or killer-robot AI.
A recent article by Melissa Heikkilla highlighted some research looking into this, and what babies might be able to teach AI. As she says in her opening paragraph:
Human babies are fascinating creatures. Despite being completely dependent on their parents for a long time, they can do some amazing stuff. Babies have an innate understanding of the physics of our world and can learn new concepts and languages quickly, even with limited information. Even the most powerful AI systems we have today lack those abilities. Language models that power systems like ChatGPT, for example, are great at predicting the next word in a sentence but don’t have anything even close to the common sense of a toddler.
Just let that sink in: ChatGPT doesn't have anything even close to the common sense of a toddler. It's true. Maybe the killer robots won't destroy us all tomorrow then after all, if ever. Sorry to disappoint you, Mad-Max, Elon.
Melissa also highlights the work of researchers at New York University who have looked at this more closely and considered: what if we could help AI learn as a baby learns? Could this help AI develop more of the common sense and the understanding a toddler has?
The short answer based on this research seems to be yes, babies can help AI understand the real world a lot. The researchers took the following approach:
Researchers at New York University wanted to see what such models could do when they were trained on a much smaller data set: the sights and sounds experienced by a single child learning to talk. To their surprise, their AI learned a lot—thanks to a curious baby called Sam.
This involved strapping a camera to the baby's head to record all the sights and sounds the baby would experience, as we can see here demonstrated by our great AI teacher Sam.
The research was conducted over 18 months collecting huge amounts of visual and audio data. As Melissa describes:
The researchers strapped a camera on Sam’s head, and he wore it off and on for one and a half years, from the time he was six months old until a little after his second birthday. The material he collected allowed the researchers to teach a neural network to match words to the objects they represent.
Example footage from baby Sam's head camera (courtesy of Sam's dad & MIT Technology Review)
Are you impressed to see how hard baby Sam, and cats are working to contribute to research to help improve our understanding of AI? I’m very impressed!
The research paper concluded:
Our model acquires many word-referent mappings present in the child’s everyday experience, enables zero-shot generalisation to new visual referents, and aligns its visual and linguistic conceptual systems. These results show how critical aspects of grounded word meaning are learnable through joint representation and associative learning from one child’s input.
You can read more about this research in this article and in this research paper.
These are impressive and promising results, given how difficult it has been for AI researchers to develop similar abilities in AI that come easily and naturally for humans
But what does this mean for AI now and in the future?
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