AI can better retain what it learns by mimicking human sleep

Human brains consolidate memories while sleeping. Could AI systems use the same technique? Building AIs that sleep and dream can lead to better results and more reliable models, according to researchers who aim to replicate the architecture and behaviour of the human brain. But other experts say recreating the intelligence we see within ourselves may not be the most fruitful path for AI research. Concetto Spampinato and his colleagues at the University of Catania, Italy, were looking for ways to avoid a phenomenon known as "catastrophic forgetting", where an AI model trained to do a new task loses the ability to carry out jobs it previously aced.