DeepMind Gives AI 'Intuition' by Training It Like a Baby
Babies are cheerful, cuddly, giggling balls of joy. They are also very powerful learning machines. At three months old, they already have an intuition about how things around them behave — without anyone explicitly teaching them the rules of the game. This ability, dubbed “intuitive physics”, seems very trivial on the surface. If I fill a glass with water and place it on the table, I know that it is an object—something I can wrap in my hand without melting it in the palm of my hand. It will not sink through the table. And if it starts to float, I’ll stare and then immediately run out the door. Babies quickly develop this ability by absorbing data from their external environment, forming a kind of “common sense” about the dynamics of the physical world. When things don’t move as expected—for example, in a magic trick where objects disappear—they will show surprise. For AI, it’s a completely different matter. While recent AI models have beaten humans from playing games to solving