DeepMind’s advance could lead to machines that can make better sense of a scene.

• by Will Knight

Machines will need to get a lot better at making sense of the world on their own if they are ever going to become truly intelligent.

DeepMind, the AI-focused subsidiary of Alphabet, has taken a step in that direction by making a computer program that builds a mental picture of the world all by itself. You might say that it learns to imagine the world around it.

The system, which uses what DeepMind’s researchers call a generative query network (GQN), looks at a scene from several angles and can then describe what it would look like from another angle.

This might seem trivial, but it requires a relatively sophisticated ability to learn about the physical world. In contrast to many AI vision systems, the DeepMind program makes sense of a scene more the way a person does. Even if something is partly occluded, for example, it can reason about what’s there...