In recent years, the phrase “artificial intelligence” has made headlines with enviable regularity. And various systems based on AI already in many areas show themselves no worse than humans. Machines beat cybersportsmen in video games, make scientific discoveries, and more recently they have also learned to understand languages much better than people.
Who developed the new AI program
The new program was created through the efforts of a large Chinese conglomerate Alibaba and, according to MIT Technology Review, it works with the MS MARCO dataset from Microsoft. MS MARCO is, roughly speaking, an extensive database of real-life queries that users have addressed to the Bing search engine. It was on queries and their formulations in different languages that artificial intelligence was "trained".
How AI was trained
It's actually pretty simple. The program had to process a huge number of web pages in order to answer the question "What is a corporation?" Based on user requests, as well as on the given answer options, the system has developed an algorithm for formulating an answer. Interestingly, the answer itself was not shown to the system. She had to “guess” herself which option was correct. In other words, "people taught the machine to google."
In this case, the correct phrase was considered "A corporation is a company or a group of people authorized to act as a single organization and recognized as such at the legislative level." When it came time for the control tests, the system and people were asked this question, and the machine coped much faster. Moreover, AI was much better than humans at giving the correct answer in other languages (not just the one in which the request was made).
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Why is this needed?
According to Lu Xi, senior vice president of Alibaba, the new algorithm has a bright future.
Vladimir Kuznetsov