People are vastly underestimating the changes that are about to come from NLP. The basic ideas of how to get language models working are just about in place. Transformer networks, and recent innovations like GPT-2, googles reformer model, etc are precursors to the real machine learning boom. Machine learning as we have known it, has been stuck as an optimization tool, and used for computer vision here and there. NLP,…
This is begging the question as to whether the model "understands" anything at all. And once you adopt a definition of "understanding" that isn't equivalent to "got a high score on some pointless academic challenge" the answer is a resounding "no." The whole enterprise of AGI hype is based on this equivocation of words like "understanding" and "intelligence." We use a very restricted definition in proving that the tech is smart, and then switch out our restricted definition for the colloquial one when the audience isn't looking.
> This will unlock better conversational abilities
Shouldn't be hard given that as it stands there are none, except for creating a human-sounding slurry that is devoid of real content.
> but also, better ways to understand how different pieces of textual information relate
Is this a real need? What problem does this solve that forums + wikipedia + arxiv + google + a literate human hasn't already?