Is the Rat Smarter Than AI?

For years, scientists have been building smart machines that can recognize faces, drive cars, and even beat humans at chess. But what if I told you that a tiny creature, often found in sewers and garbage bins, might actually be smarter than these machines in some ways? That creature is the rat. A recent study by Muratore, Alemi, and Zoccolan (2025) shows that rats have an incredible ability to recognize objects, and in some cases, they outperform artificial intelligence (AI).

Full article: https://www.cell.com/patterns/fulltext/S2666-3899(24)00321-0

Scientists have long known that rats are good at solving problems, but they wanted to test how well rats recognize objects when they are changed in different ways. To do this, they used a deep learning system called a convolutional neural network (CNN)—a type of AI that is often used for image recognition.

The scientists tested rats and the AI with different challenges:

  1. Size, Rotation, and Movement: Objects were made bigger, smaller, or rotated.
  2. Occlusion: Parts of objects were covered or hidden.
  3. Outlines: Only the basic shape of the object was shown.

Then, they compared how well rats and AI performed.

  • When an object was just resized or rotated, AI could match the rats’ ability using mid-level layers of the CNN.
  • When objects were partially covered or shown only as outlines, rats performed better than the AI, even when all layers of the CNN were used.
  • Rats used the same visual features over and over, no matter how the object changed, while AI changed its strategy, making it less reliable.

This study shows that rats have a natural intelligence that today’s AI still struggles to match. While AI can process massive amounts of data, it doesn’t always understand objects the way a rat does.

A rat’s brain has evolved to recognize objects quickly and accurately in messy, real-world situations. If you move an object, hide part of it, or change how it looks, a rat will still know what it is. AI, on the other hand, sometimes gets confused.

Scientists believe that AI could be improved by learning from how rats process visual information. Right now, AI needs massive amounts of data to learn, and even then, it sometimes fails when faced with something new.

 Rats don’t need thousands of examples to recognize an object—they just know. If AI could work the same way, it could become much better at understanding images in real-world situations.

In some ways, yes! AI can do amazing things, but when it comes to real-world object recognition, rats have the edge.

 Their brains have evolved to recognize objects in a way that AI still can’t fully replicate.

So next time you see a rat running down an alley, remember—it might just be outsmarting a machine.

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *