PNAS paper compares children, adults and AI agents exploring the same open-ended environment
AlisonGopnik · x · 2026-11-09
Cognitive scientist Alison Gopnik and collaborators published a new PNAS paper placing children, adults, and AI agents in the same open-ended Minecraft-style environment and letting them play freely. The study shows intrinsic rewards like entropy and empowerment shape spontaneous exploration across all three, offering a unified framework for understanding human curiosity and designing AI exploration mechanisms.
More from AGI Musings
- Dev reframes LLMs as "universal translators" translating between representations — brandon_xyzw · 2026-11-09
- The bitter lesson isn't 'naive wins' — it's whatever scales best with compute — pzakin · 2026-11-09
- Owain Evans: now is the right time to switch into AI safety work — OwainEvans_UK · 2026-11-09
- Henry Farrell: the "machine gods" metaphor shrinks AI policy debate and should be resisted — sebkrier · 2026-11-09
- Thomas Dietterich: map what LLMs can assess reliably, design UX for the rest — JessicaHullman · 2026-11-09
- Bitter lesson redux: methods that generalize beat compute brute force, Sutton weighs in — ryanallred · 2026-11-09