Dr. Karl Friston on the Fabric of Intelligence - Intelligent Agents, State Spaces, Active Learning

Denise Holt reports from the 4th Annual International Workshop on Active Inference (IWAI), September 2023, where the highlight of the event was a 1.5 hour long exclusive presentation with the father of Active Inference & the Free Energy Principle, Dr. Karl J. Friston, Chief Scientist at VERSES AI.

In this groundbreaking video, Dr. Friston unveils his latest research on Active Inference, shedding light on its potential as a systematic blueprint for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Watch as Friston and his VERSES team pioneer a new kind of AI that mimics biological intelligence, making any data 'smart'.

Learn how intelligent agents leverage generative models and state spaces to perceive, adapt to, and reshape environments. Witness Friston’s simulations of autonomous systems dynamically pooling knowledge through emergent communication protocols to achieve flexible, human-like coordination.

Witness the structured learning breakthroughs that move beyond today’s pattern recognition to decode raw data streams into organized representations, goals, and plans - the foundations for artificial general intelligence.

Find out how VERSES’ Spatial Web Protocol enables seamless belief sharing across specialized agents to form efficient, mutually predictable worlds. Gain perspective on inductive planning, information-theoretic formalisms, model comparison, epistemic foraging, dynamics of learning, and more groundbreaking Active Inference innovations.

While Friston’s presentation was meant only as a glimpse, these insights keep VERSES AI at the leading edge of creating Autonomous Intelligent Systems (AIS) that can understand, communicate, and adapt as humans do.

 

🎥 Chapters:

00:00 — Introduction by Tim and Karl Friston’s Opening Remarks

06:09 — The Significance of Free Energy in Understanding Life

07:10 — Exploring Markov Blankets and Factor Graphs

09:56 — Hierarchical Generative Models and Time Perception

13:36 — Active Inference and Planning with Expected Free Energy

15:40 — Joint Free Energy and Generalized Synchrony in Physics

16:40 — The Role of Paths and Intentions in Physics and Active Inference

17:35 — Specifying Endpoints of Paths as Goals

30:26 — Communication and Belief Sharing in Federated Systems

31:35 — Generative Models and Perception in Agents

40:19 — Model Comparison and Latent State Discovery

41:25 — Active Model Selection and Handwritten Digit Styles

45:30 — Structured Learning and Object Localization

49:10 — Epistemic Foraging and Confidence in Learning

50:21 — The Dynamics of Information Gain and Learning

51:29 — Conclusion and Q&A Begins

01:19:33 — Emphasis on Constraints in the Free Energy Principle

01:23:40 — Closing Remarks

01:24:55 — Karl Friston’s Reflections on the Field’s Evolution and the Next Generation

 

All content for Spatial Web AI is independently created by Denise Holt.

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