A team of machine learning researchers from Google’s DeepMind claim to have demonstrated that AI can acquire skills in a process analogous to social learning in humans and other animals.
Social learning — where one individual acquires skills and knowledge from another by copying — is vital to the process of development in humans and much of the animal kingdom. The Deepmind team claim to be the first to demonstrate the process in artificial intelligence.
Cultural transmission is the domain-general social skill that allows agents to acquire and use information from each other in real-time with high fidelity and recall. It can be thought of as the process that perpetuates fit variants in cultural evolution. In humans, cultural evolution has led to the accumulation and refinement of skills, tools and knowledge across generations. We provide a method for generating cultural transmission in artificially intelligent agents, in the form of few-shot imitation. Our agents succeed at real-time imitation of a human in novel contexts without using any pre-collected human data. We identify a surprisingly simple set of ingredients sufficient for generating cultural transmission and develop an evaluation methodology for rigorously assessing it. This paves the way for cultural evolution to play an algorithmic role in the development of artificial general intelligence.
