AI Is About to Learn More Like Humans--with a Little Uncertainty

Neural networks are all the rage in Silicon Valley, infusing so many internet services with so many forms of artificial intelligence. But as good as they may be at recognizing cats in your online photos, AI researchers know that neural networks are still quite flawed, so much so that some wonder whether these pattern recognition systems are a viable path to more advanced--and more reliable--forms of AI. Able to learn tasks by analyzing vast amounts of data, neural networks power everything from face recognition at Facebook to translation at Microsoft to internet search at Google. They're beginning to help chatbots learn the art of conversation. But because they can't make sense of the world without help from such large amounts of carefully labelled data, they aren't suited to everything.