Via Freethink.com – DeepMind has created a virtual playground that shows a path to creating general AI — the holy grail of artificial intelligence.

“General AI doesn’t currently exist, because no one has figured out how to teach a machine to succeed at tasks it wasn’t specifically trained on.

In theory, we could just train an agent on everything, one task at a time, but that would require so much training data and time that it’s simply not feasible.

Welcome to XLand: Google sister company DeepMind has now highlighted a potential path to general AI.It designed a virtual world called ​​’XLand,’ where AI agents could navigate environments that look a bit like Battle Courses from Mario Kart. It then built an algorithm that could create billions of different game-like tasks for the AIs to complete in XLand. 

The agents were rewarded for correctly completing tasks, just like they would in a standard reinforcement learning environment, and each new task was designed to be just hard enough to keep the agent learning something new.

The results: By the end of the study, the AIs were able to complete a range of tasks and could rapidly master games that completely stumped new AIs trained from scratch.”

Source: DeepMind’s virtual playground suggests path to general AI