The field of AI has made dramatic progress in the last decade. The list of triumphs runs long, from the first computer program beating a human master at the game of Go to an AI “robot” writing an essay for a major newspaper.

But even the best of today’s state-of-the-art AI systems remain far below the level of humans on many of the core abilities associated with intelligence. While they excel in narrow domains, they largely lack the commonsense, intuitive knowledge that underlies intelligent behavior, as well as the ability for “meta-learning” — learning how to learn or what learning strategies to use in different situations. Unlike their naturally intelligent counterparts, today’s AI systems are not yet capable of open-ended “lifelong” learning, or of preventing catastrophic forgetting.

Our project aims to address a foundational weakness in how intelligence itself is understood, which we believe is inhibiting progress at the frontiers of machine intelligence. By bringing together AI specialists and researchers who think deeply about the nature of intelligence in different disciplines, our institute at SFI will inspire new breakthroughs in AI research through concentrated, collaborative effort.

In the past, some of the most successful AI approaches have been inspired by biological intelligence. Such approaches include neural networks and evolutionary computation, as well as methods inspired by the immune system, ant colonies, and economic markets. However, the implementations in biologically inspired AI systems are often based on outdated and shallow understanding of how these natural systems work.

A broader and deeper understanding of the sources of intelligence in natural systems may dramatically improve AI, and might also provide us with more appropriate

metrics of intelligence — not just the speed and accuracy of answers, but robustness to noise, flexibility in different domains, problems and environments, and scalability to large sizes and large sets of interactions among components.

The Santa Fe Institute, which is known for its interdisciplinary culture and its contributions to natural, artificial, and collective intelligence, is the ideal location for our institute, which will take the time to formulate longer-term questions and approaches to AI.