Why did humans evolve the eyes we have today? While scientists can’t go back in time to study the environmental pressures that shaped the evolution of the diverse vision systems that exist in nature, a new computational framework developed by MIT researchers allows them to explore this evolution in artificial intelligence agents. The framework they developed, in which embodied AI agents evolve eyes and learn to see over many generations, is like a “scientific sandbox” that allows researchers to recreate different evolutionary trees. The user does this by changing the structure of the world and the tasks AI agents complete, […]

Most languages use word position and sentence structure to extract meaning. For example, “The cat sat on the box,” is not the same as “The box was on the cat.” Over a long text, like a financial document or a novel, the syntax of these words likely evolves.  Similarly, a person might be tracking variables in a piece of code or following instructions that have conditional actions. These are examples of state changes and sequential reasoning that we expect state-of-the-art artificial intelligence systems to excel at; however, the existing, cutting-edge attention mechanism within transformers — the primarily architecture used in […]

The following article originally appeared on Medium and is being republished here with the author’s permission. There’s a fake confidence you can carry around when you’re learning a new technology. You watch a few videos, skim some docs, get a toy example working, and tell yourself, “Yeah, I’ve got this.” I’ve done that. It never lasts. A difficult lesson often accompanies the only experience that matters. You learn through failure—falling flat on your face, looking at the mess, and figuring out why it broke. Anything that feels too easy? It probably was, and you didn’t exit the process with anything worth learning. […]