By Human know-how derives in part from our nose for novelty — we’re curious creatures, whether looking around corners or testing scientific hypotheses. For artificial intelligence to have a broad and nuanced understanding of the world — so it can navigate everyday obstacles, interact with strangers or invent new medicines — it also needs to explore new ideas and experiences on its own. But with infinite possibilities for what to do next, how can AI decide which directions are the most novel and useful?
One idea is to automatically leverage human intuition to decide what’s interesting through large language models trained on mass quantities of human text — the kind of software powering chatbots. Two new papers take this approach, suggesting a path toward smarter self-driving cars, for example, or automated scientific discovery.
