In Brief While developing negotiating chatbot agents, Facebook researchers found that the bots spontaneously developed their own non-human language as they improved their techniques, highlighting how little we still know about how artificial intelligences learn. The Future of Language

A recent Facebook report on the way chatbots converse with each other has given the world a glimpse intothe future of language.

In the report, researchers from the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab (FAIR) describe training their chatbot dialog agents to negotiate using machine learning. The chatbots were eager and successful dealmaking pupils, but the researchers eventually realized they needed to tweak their model because the bots were creating their own negotiation language, diverting from human languages.

To put it another way, when they used a model that allowed the chatbots to converse freely, using machine learning to incrementally improve their conversational negotiation strategies as they chatted, the bots eventually created and used their own non-human language.

The unique, spontaneous development of a non-human language was probably the most baffling and thrilling development for the researchers, but it wasnt the only one. The chatbots also proved to be smart about negotiating and used advanced strategies to improve their outcomes. For example, a bot might pretend to be interested in something that had no value to it in order to be able to sacrifice that thing later as part of a compromise.

Although Facebooks bargain-hunting bots arent a sign of an imminent singularity or anything even approaching that level of sophistication they are significant, in part because they prove once again that an important realm we once assumed was solely the domain of humans, language, is definitely a shared space. This discovery also highlights how much we still dont know about the ways that artificial intelligences (AIs) think and learn, even when we create them and model them after ourselves.

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A Facebook AI Unexpectedly Created Its Own Unique Language - Futurism