New Deep Learning System Allows AI To Solve 'Catastrophic Forgetting' Problem

Reading the news you'd imagine Artificial Intelligence technologies as almighty and unstoppable: after all, they beat human players in ancient Chinese board games, make self-driving cars smarter, under one form or another could soon replace bankers, lawyers and who knows what next. Yet, as the CEO of Boston-based startup Neurala Massimiliano "Max" Versace would put it, in terms of developing and deploying AIs we're still "technology cavepeople". So far AI works great when it is set to focus on a single task, like forecasting bitcoin fluctuations, but it's less reliable when it has to deal with a number of simultaneous, interwoven factors. One of the current constraints of artificial intelligence is called "catastrophic forgetting", and researchers have been struggling with it for a while. In short this means that an AI system needs to forget the skills and knowledge it has learnt in the past, in order to learn new ones.