I recently came across a system being designed to perform Objective-Driven AI. I had a fun time exploring this topic on the internet.

Objective-Driven AI is being defined as AI systems that “can learn, reason, plan”

Yann Lecun from Meta’s AI team has published these works on Objective-Driven AI:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyqXLJsmsrk
• https://openreview.net/forum?id=BZ5a1r-kVsf
• https://drive.google.com/file/d/1wzHohvoSgKGZvzOWqZybjm4M4veKR6t3/view

I found out that the current Generative AI uses less causality and does more pattern matching. Causality refers to a cause-effect relationship. There are two terms important here: Causal Reasoning and Causal Inference. Causal ‘reasoning’ is a psychology term where one confirms the reasoning of a cause having a certain effect. Causal ‘inference’ is a mathematical and statistical methodology where the cause-and-effect relationship is established in maths.

And sure enough, the results of the research are out:

Question: “Can behavioral psychology be used as a foundation to provide the causal knowledge required here (to improve AI systems)?”

Answer by GPT4 : “Yes, behavioral psychology can indeed serve as a valuable foundation for providing the causal knowledge necessary for enhancing AI systems, particularly when it comes to understanding human behaviors and decisions. Integrating insights from behavioral psychology into AI involves translating patterns of human behavior into models that AI systems can learn from and predict.“

What does this all mean:

It means that theoretically Generative AI can be improved and turned into Objective-Driven AI (“can learn, reason, plan”) by making more use of:

• Statistics, specifically causal inference
• Behavioural Psychology and all the library of research in this domain
• Layering the above into Generative AI’s responses to give a causal reasoning-based output.

This is an open area of research. It stems from the frustration with Gen AI where it hallucinates and gives wrong outputs and can not plan. Generative AI is based on probability, statistics, and mathematical pattern matching (Note: This is done by NVIDIA GPUs mostly which is why Nvidia’s share price is skyrocketing).

Generative AI always comes with a note saying ‘can make mistakes’. The Generative AI tools are basically not made for people who might put too much faith in their answers and trust too much the outputs. Similarly, Generative AI can’t reason, learn and plan which is something humans can do very well. In no way is Generative AI in any competition with Human Intelligence for now. But the academia is working on closing the gaps. Objective-Driven AI is a step in that direction. The details around the Objective-Driven AI systems are given in the three links above.

Now lets bring into this perspective what Qualcomm is saying:

Qualcomm is in the smartphone hardware line of business and its CEO highlights:

• Qualcomm CEO Envisions Smartphones as ​‘Pervasive’ AI-Powered Personal Assistants

Qualcomm says that AI will run on smartphones one day and will free up human time for doing creative tasks. The mundane tasks will be taken over by AI virtual assistants on smartphones.

Given this vision of pervasive AI and given Objective-Driven AI that is geared toward reasoning and planning, it can easily be concluded that AI will definitely improve human lives in the years to come.

Interesting times ahead.

Thank you for reading, Habib

Reference Link regarding Quallcomm: ” https://www.iqmetrix.com/blog/ces-2024-qualcomm-ceo-envisions-smartphones-as-pervasive-ai-powered-personal-assistants ”