Was Facebook right to shut down its AI after it invented its own language? originally appeared on Quora, the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus.
An article titled Researchers shut down AI that invented its own language (and various rereports of that article) recently made the rounds on social media. That story is very misleading. Facebook does not appear to have “shut down an AI” that invented its own language, for example out of any fear that it would get out of control.
Here is a more realistic reporting of Facebook’s AI experiment: A Facebook AI Unexpectedly Created Its Own Unique Language.
In experimenting with language learning, a research algorithm ended up deviating from human language in a way that wasn’t really useful… it started generating what one might call “functional gibberish”. It was functional in that it continued to carry information, but it wasn’t very efficient or useful.
You could compare it to the weird routes that Google Maps generates sometimes… sure they might save thirty seconds of driving, but they involve ten turns down obscure side streets instead of three turns on main streets.
The result was intriguing because it showed the algorithm’s capacity for generating its own encoding scheme, and also showed what can happen with unconstrained feedback in an automated social language product.
The algorithm wasn’t “shut down” any more than myriad algorithms are shut down every time engineers change the algorithm. Most likely the algorithm was only running on a test dataset and was never "live” or interacting with real humans.
Could this idea, taken to its logical extreme, lead one day to software being “alive” and “conscious”? Maybe. It is certainly an intriguing possibility.
This question originally appeared on Quora. More questions on Quora: * Facebook: Are Facebook and LinkedIn's products moving towards competing with each other? * Computational Neuroscience: What is the difference between Computational neuroscience and Systems neuroscience? * Programming Languages: How does one create a programming language? Photo Credit: fandijki/Getty Images