It appears artificial intelligence is getting the Montessori treatment when it comes to self-learning.
Cortica, an international AI startup, is implementing unsupervised learning that allows an autonomous system to process data and figure out its environment. For perspective, supervised machine learning is when the AI is given a set of examples and a set of parameters so that it can learn to recognize similar items in the future. If you wanted to teach an AI system what a stop sign looks like, for instance, you could show it thousands of varying images of stop signs so that it can begin recognizing them. With unsupervised learning, the stop signs wouldn’t be labeled “stop signs” but instead the machine would have to organize and classify the examples based on commonalities, like the fact that all stop signs are red and white and are octagons.
The system Cortica developed to help manufacturers and developers take in all the data from the sensors, processes the images, clusters them, and tags them with metadata that has already been defined, according to a company press release.
Considering that Elon Musk is concerned that AI will pose an “existential risk,” it’s reassuring that the video Cortica provided of unsupervised learning is rather tame.
Check out the video below to see how it works: