Facebook announced several new hires of top academics in the field of artificial intelligence Tuesday, among them a roboticist known for her work at Disney making animated figures move in more human-like ways.

The reason for the social media giant’s sudden interest in robotics is central to the problem of how AI systems work today, writes Ryan Nakashima at philly.com.

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Today, most successful AI systems have to be exposed to millions of data points labeled by humans – like, say, photos of cats – before they can learn to recognize patterns that people take for granted. Similarly, game-playing bots like Google’s computerized Go master AlphaGo Zero require tens of thousands of trials to learn the best moves from their failures.

“Clearly we’re missing something in terms of how humans can learn so fast,” said Yann LeCun, Facebook’s chief AI scientist, in a call with reporters last week. “So far the best ideas have come out of robotics.”

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