Alphabet's new AI has the reading comprehension of a teenager

Alphabet’s AI research company DeepMind has released the next generation of its language model, and it says that it has close to the reading comprehension of a high schooler. The language model, called Gopher, was able to significantly improve its reading comprehension by ingesting massive repositories of texts online. Such a system could allow us to “safely and efficiently to summarize information, provide expert advice and follow instructions via natural language,” according to a statement. In a test, the model was able to score highly enough on a high school reading comprehension test to approach human-level performance, according to DeepMind’s paper. But there are other issues, like perpetuating harmful stereotypes, that are proving more difficult to overcome. Commercial products like digital assistants and translators. In a test, Gopher was able to have a full dialogue with a human with a “surprising” level of coherence, according to DeepMind.