Deep Learning Networks Can't Generalize--But They're Learning from the Brain

"Bias" in AI is often treated as a dirty word. But to Dr. Andreas Tolias at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, bias may also be the solution to smarter, more human-like AI. I'm not talking about societal biases--racial or gender, for example--that are passed onto our machine creations. Rather, it's a type of "beneficial" bias present in the structure of a neural network and how it learns. Similar to genetic rules that help initialize our brains well before birth, "inductive bias" may help narrow down the infinite ways artificial minds develop; for example, guiding them down a "developmental" path that eventually makes them more flexible.