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Baidu’s artificial intelligence research team has achieved a significant milestone: teaching a virtual agent ‘living’ in a 2D environment how to navigate its world using natural language commands, by first teaching it language through positive and negative reinforcement. The especially exciting thing, according to the scientists, is that the agent ended up developing a “zero-shot learning ability,” which essentially means that the AI agent developed a basic sense of grammar. You probably don’t remember it from personal experience because it happened when you were a baby, but this is basically how parents teach their kids when very young. You show them images, repeat words, and eventually, with enough positive reinforcement, the kid can associate those words with those images and voila – it knows the names of things. Baidu’s big breakthrough, though, is that the agent within its system can apply commands its learned to new situations – computers aren’t great at taking knowledge acquired before and applying it to new things.
techcrunch.com/2017/03/30/baidus-ai-team-taught-a-virtual-agent-just-like-a-human-would-their-baby/