Bootstrapping Developmental AIs: From Simple Competences to Intelligent Human-Compatible AIs

The mainstream approaches for creating AIs are the generative and deep learning AI approaches with large language models (LLMs) and the traditional manually constructed symbolic AI approach. Manually constructed AIs are generally brittle even in circumscribed domains. Generative AIs make strange mistakes and do not notice them. In both approaches the AIs cannot be instructed easily, fail to use common sense, and lack curiosity. They have abstract knowledge but lack social alignment. Developmental AIs may have more potential. They develop competences like human children do. They start with innate competences, interact with the environment, and learn from their interactions. They interact and learn from people and establish perceptual, cognitive, and common grounding. Developmental AIs have demonstrated capabilities including visual and multimodal perception, and object recognition and manipulation. Computational models for abstraction discovery, curiosity, imitation learning, and early language acquisition have also been demonstrated. The promise is that developmental AIs will acquire self-developed and socially developed competences like people do. They would address the shortcomings of current mainstream AI approaches, and ultimately lead to sophisticated forms of learning involving critical reading, provenance evaluation, and hypothesis testing. However, developmental AI projects have not yet fully reached toddler level competencies corresponding to human development at about two years of age, before their speech is fluent. They do not bridge the Reading Barrier, to skillfully and skeptically draw on online information resources. This position paper lays out the logic, prospects, gaps, and challenges for extending the practice of developmental AIs to create intelligent, human-compatible AIs.