The desks inside iSee’s space are covered with sensors and pieces of hardware the team has put together to take control of its first prototype, a Lexus hybrid SUV that originally belonged to one of the company’s cofounders. Several engineers sit behind large computer monitors staring intently at lines of code.

iSee might seem laughably small compared to the driverless-car efforts at companies like Waymo, Uber, or Ford, but the technology it’s developing could have a big impact on many areas where AI is applied today. By enabling machines to learn from less data, and to build some form of common sense, their technology could make industrial robots smarter, especially about new situations. Spectacular progress has already been made in AI recently thanks to deep learning, a technique that employs vast data-hungry neural networks (see “10 Breakthrough Technologies 2013: Deep Learning”).

When fed large amounts of data, very large or deep neural networks can recognize subtle patterns. Give a deep neural network lots of pictures of dogs, for instance, and it will figure out how to spot a dog in just about any image. But there are limits to what deep learning can do, and some radical new ideas may well be needed to bring about the next leap forward. For example, a dog-spotting deep-learning system doesn’t understand that dogs typically have four legs, fur, and a wet nose. And it cannot recognize other types of animals, or a drawing of a dog, without further training.

Driving involves considerably more than just pattern recognition. Human drivers rely constantly on a commonsense understanding of the world. They know that buses take longer to stop, for example, and can suddenly produce lots of pedestrians. It would be impossible to program a self-driving car with every possible scenario it might encounter. But people are able to use their commonsense understanding of the world, built up through lifelong experience, to act sensibly in all sorts of new situations.

“Deep learning is great, and you can learn a lot from previous experience, but you can’t have a data set that includes the whole world,” Zhao says. “Current AI, which is mostly data-driven, has difficulties understanding common sense; that’s the key thing that’s missing.” Zhao illustrates the point by opening his laptop to show several real-world road situations on YouTube, including complex traffic-merging situations and some hairy-looking accidents.

A lack of commonsense knowledge has certainly caused some problems for autonomous driving systems. An accident involving a Tesla driving in semi-autonomous mode in Florida last year, for instance, occurred when the car’s sensors were temporarily confused as a truck crossed the highway (see “Fatal Tesla Crash Is a Reminder Autonomous Cars Will Sometimes Screw Up”). A human driver would have likely quickly and safely figured out what was going on.