A computer program that learns to "imagine" the world shows how AI can think more like us

Machines will need to get a lot better at making sense of the world on their own if they are ever going to become truly intelligent. DeepMind, the AI-focused subsidiary of Alphabet, has taken a step in that direction by making a computer program that builds a mental picture of the world all by itself. You might say that it learns to imagine the world around it. The system, which uses what DeepMind's researchers call a generative query network (GQN), looks at a scene from several angles and can then describe what it would look like from another angle. This might seem trivial, but it requires a relatively sophisticated ability to learn about the physical world.