In 2024, the first girl developed with artificial intelligence (AI) called Tong Tong. The announcement was made at the 'Frontiers of General Artificial Intelligence' technology exhibition in Beijing, Chinawhere it was explained that, according to its creators, the robot has the emotional intelligence and behavior of a three or four year old child.
This robot was developed by the Beijing Institute of General Artificial Intelligence (BIGAI). According to researchers, Tong Tong (a word that means 'girl' in Spanish) has the ability to continually improve her skills, knowledge and values.
The South China Morning Post reported that the girl created with Artificial Intelligence can learn on her own, assign herself tasks, interpret human intentions and, unlike typical large language models (LLM), show emotions such as joy, anger and sorrow .
It should be noted that LLM is a technology that has a deep learning model with large amounts of data, that is, the tools are capable of training without supervision. Having the ability to understand grammar, languages and basic knowledge based on their constant interaction, such as AI chatbots from ChatGPT or Bard from Google.
However, the difference and novelty that this robot presents is its ability to assign itself tasks and act, in some way, autonomously.
According to the aforementioned Asian media, BIGAI stated in a video thate “Tong Tong possesses a mind and strives to understand the common sense taught by humans. “She discerns good from evil, expresses her attitudes in various situations and has the power to shape the future.”
It should be noted that Tong Tong has no physical form. It is an AI-powered robot that exists and operates within a virtual environment that it can interact with. In fact, according to what was reported by the South China Morning Post, visitors to the conference were able to speak with the girl.
In this interaction, the Daily Mail UK noted that participants were able to establish a conversation with Tong Tong and assign tasks to him. The English media highlighted that the girl was ordered to fix a picture frame in her virtual environment and that, in addition, the assistants were able to observe her autonomous task capacity when one of the participants spilled milk inside the virtual room and the girl cleaned it without asking.
It is noted that it has not yet been proven whether Tong Tong is a completely autonomous agent, however, its creators imply that it is much more independent than other Artificial Intelligences, explaining that it has the ability to define new tasks based on values and human interaction. .
At the exhibition, the director of BIGAI, Zhu Songchun, a computer scientist who left his professorship at a California university in 2020 to create the Institute, presented a test called the “Tong test”, which aims to replace the Turing test. that evaluates artificial general intelligence.
The test evaluates the ability of AI entities to understand environments. Among the questions, the vision, language, cognition, movement and learning of robots are rated, in addition to their values and social needs. In fact, Zhu said, in dialogue with the South China Morning Post, that to move forward “we must create entities that can understand the real world and possess a wide range of skills.”
Their goal is to develop an AI that can “learn and execute tasks in complex environments, driven by values and an understanding of causality.”