Give AI curiosity, and it will watch TV forever

Most of the artificial intelligence used for translation, tagging photos on Facebook, and optimizing the best route for navigation relies on humans feeding the AI some information to start. We show the algorithms which sentences are equivalent in other languages, what a person looks like in different photos, and how to plot the ideal course for a car. But some AI researchers are exploring how to give algorithms a sense of curiosity, so they can learn without any human guidance. New research from OpenAI, the non-profit AI lab founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and other Silicon Valley bigwigs, in collaboration with researchers from UC Berkeley and the University of Edinburgh, has found that when an AI algorithm is given a simple definition of curiosity, it can, without any human-provided information, explore more than 50 video games--and even beat some of them. But curiosity comes with a cost.