At six months old, a baby won’t bat an eye if a toy truck drives off a platform and seems to hover in the air. But perform the same experiment a mere two to three months later, and she will instantly recognize that something is wrong. She has already learned the concept of gravity.

“Nobody tells the baby that objects are supposed to fall,” said Yann LeCun, the chief AI scientist at Facebook and a professor at NYU, during a webinaron Thursday organized by the Association for Computing Machinery, an industry body. And because babies don’t have very sophisticated motor control, he hypothesizes, “a lot of what they learn about the world is through observation.”

That theory could have important implications for researchers hoping to advance the boundaries of artificial intelligence. Read More

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