Animal-AI Olympics Will Test AI on Intelligence Tasks Designed for Crows and Chimps

Are today’s best artificial intelligence (AI) systems as smart as a mouse? A crow? A chimp? A new contest aims to find out. 

The Animal-AI Olympics, which will begin this June, aims to “benchmark the current level of various AIs against different animal species using a range of established animal cognition tasks.” At stake are bragging rights and $10,000 in prizes.

The project, a partnership between the University of Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and GoodAI, a research institution based in Prague, is a new way to evaluate the progress of AI systems toward what researchers call artificial general intelligence.

While AI systems have recently bested humans in a host of challenging competitions, including the board game Go, the poker game Texas Hold’em, and the video game StarCraft, these matchups only proved that AIs were astoundingly good at these particular tasks. AIs have yet to demonstrate the kind of flexible intelligence that enables humans to reason, plan, and act in many different domains.