What are some of the big unsolved problems with AI?
Unsupervised learning is really, really important. Right now, the way we’re teaching machines to be intelligent is that we have to tell the computer what is an image, even at the pixel level. For autonomous driving, humans label huge numbers of images of cars to show which parts are pedestrians or roads. It’s not at all how humans learn, and it’s not how animals learn. We’re missing something big. This is one of the main things we’re doing in my lab, but there are no short-term applications—it’s probably not going to be useful to build a product tomorrow.
Another big challenge is natural language understanding. We’ve been making pretty fast progress in the past few years, so it’s very encouraging. But it’s still not at the level where we would say the machine understands. That would be when we could read a paragraph and then ask any question about it, and the machine would basically answer in a reasonable way, as a human would. We are still far from that.