What Does Alison Gopnik's MESS Acronym Say Children Do That Current AI Does Not?

Alison Gopnik tells Danny Fortson that children solve problems differently from current AI. Her acronym is MESS: model building, exploration, and social learning. Model building is the claim of her book The Scientist in the Crib. Children hold theories, test them, and make counterfactuals, more than spotting correlations. Exploration is what adults call getting into everything, an explore-versus-exploit tradeoff. She cites the Goldilocks effect, work by Berkeley colleague Celeste Kidd: even a nine-month-old looks longest at a just-right amount of new information. Social learning is watching people nearby and trying to join in. She sets AlphaZero, which can beat chess grandmasters, against her grandson Addie throwing the pieces in a wastebasket and inventing a new game.