The past decade’s series of dramatic AI successes has brought us closer to realizing the dream of the autonomous agent—an artificial system that can learn about its world, make decisions, and set and achieve goals, all with minimal human intervention. Nature has given us an incredible motif for the autonomous agent. Humans are born with core motivations that drive behavior, and as they gain experience, they develop increasingly sophisticated representations of their worlds, which in turn facilitate increasingly complex behaviors.

How should we attempt to realize this motif for intelligence to create autonomous agents? In this seminar, Nick Haber, assistant professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, and by courtesy, computer science, covers a number of efforts aimed at assembling pieces of it—starting with his own research into intrinsic motivation and adaptive “world model” representations, including work inspired by biology and, in particular, human development. He also describes some of the opportunities language models provide for us to make increasingly autonomous systems.

This HAI Seminar took place on October 11, 2023. Upcoming events can be found here: https://hai.stanford.edu/events