DeepMind Finds Way to Overcome AI's Forgetfulness Problem

DeepMind, the London-based artificial intelligence company owned by Alphabet Inc., claims it overcame a key limitation affecting one of the most promising machine learning technologies: the software's inability to remember. The breakthrough, described in a paper published Tuesday in the academic journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may open the way for artificial intelligence systems to be more easily applied to multiple tasks, instead of being narrowly trained for one purpose. It should also improve the ability of AI systems to transfer knowledge between tasks and to master a sequence of linked steps. Neural networks, software which is loosely based on the structure of synapses in the human brain, are considered the best machine learning technique for language translation, image classification and image generation. But these networks suffer from a major flaw scientists call "catastrophic forgetting." They exist in a kind of perpetual present: every time the network is given new data, it overwrites what it has previously learned.