Meta-Learning Teaches Us That The Brain has a Unique Learning Advantage Over AI: And it has to Do with Pleasure
Not one week goes by in which we don’t hear about another impressive milestone achieved by artificial intelligence(AI) systems. As AI research and technology advances, AI agents are constantly showing impressive learning performances that match and surpass the cognitive skills of humans in different domains. However, most AI programs still rely on computationally expensive training and, even reinforcement learning(RL) models that try to build knowledge organically require thousands of hours of training in order to match human performance. Humans, in contrast, are able to rapidly learn the fundamentals of new skills by just having a small exposure to it. The ability of the human brain to learn so efficiently has puzzled neuroscientists for decades.
One of the key differentiators between the human brain and the AI structures such as deep neural networks is that the former is more than just a combination of interconnected neurons. In addition to the electric signal exchanged between neurons, the brain is constantly segregating different chemicals known as neurotransmitters to accomplish different functions. Last year, Alphabet’s subsidiary DeepMind published a research paper proposing the thesis that one of those neurotransmitters plays a key role in the…
