“Depending on the theory of intelligence to which you subscribe, achieving ‘human-level’ AI will require a system that can leverage multiple modalities — e.g., sound, vision and text — to reason about the world. For example, when shown an image of a toppled truck and a police cruiser on a snowy freeway, a human-level AI might infer that dangerous road conditions caused an accident. Or, running on a robot, when asked to grab a can of soda from the refrigerator, they’d navigate around people, furniture and pets to retrieve the can and place it within reach of the requester.”
“Today’s AI falls short. But new research shows signs of encouraging progress, from robots that can figure out steps to satisfy basic commands (e.g., ‘get a water bottle’) to text-producing systems that learn from explanations. In this revived edition of Deep Science, our weekly series about the latest developments in AI and the broader scientific field, we’re covering work out of DeepMind, Google and OpenAI that makes strides toward systems that can — if not perfectly understand the world — solve narrow tasks like generating images with impressive robustness.”
“AI research lab OpenAI’s improved DALL-E, DALL-E 2, is easily the most impressive project to emerge from the depths of an AI research lab. As my colleague Devin Coldewey writes, while the original DALL-E demonstrated a remarkable prowess for creating images to match virtually any prompt (for example, ‘a dog wearing a beret’), DALL-E 2 takes this further. The images it produces are much more detailed, and DALL-E 2 can intelligently replace a given area in an image — for example inserting a table into a photo of a marbled floor replete with the appropriate reflections.”
“Another component is language understanding, which lags behind in many aspects — even setting aside AI’s well-documented toxicity and bias issues”
“In a new study, DeepMind researchers investigate whether AI language systems — which learn to generate text from many examples of existing text (think books and social media) — could benefit from being given explanations of those texts.”