News Feature: What are the limits of deep learning?

The much-ballyhooed artificial intelligence approach boasts impressive feats but still falls short of human brainpower. Researchers are determined to figure out what's missing. Yet the artificial intelligence (AI) identifies it as a toaster, even though it was trained with the same powerful and oft-publicized deep-learning techniques that have produced a white-hot revolution in driverless cars, speech understanding, and a multitude of other AI applications. That means the AI was shown several thousand photos of bananas, slugs, snails, and similar-looking objects, like so many flash cards, and then drilled on the answers until it had the classification down cold. And yet this advanced system was quite easily confused--all it took was a little day-glow sticker, digitally pasted in one corner of the image.