It's just a better parasite...

From Google AI:

"Modern conversational agents (chatbots) tend to be highly specialized — they perform well as long as users don’t stray too far from their expected usage.

To better handle a wide variety of conversational topics, open-domain dialog research explores a complementary approach attempting to develop a chatbot that is not specialized but can still chat about virtually anything a user wants.

Besides being a fascinating research problem, such a conversational agent could lead to many interesting applications, such as further humanizing computer interactions, improving foreign language practice, and making relatable interactive movie and videogame characters.

However, current open-domain chatbots have a critical flaw — they often don’t make sense. They sometimes say things that are inconsistent with what has been said so far, or lack common sense and basic knowledge about the world. Moreover, chatbots often give responses that are not specific to the current context.

For example, “I don’t know,” is a sensible response to any question, but it’s not specific. Current chatbots do this much more often than people because it covers many possible user inputs.

In “Towards a Human-like Open-Domain Chatbot”, we present Meena, a 2.6 billion parameter end-to-end trained neural conversational model. We show that Meena can conduct conversations that are more sensible and specific than existing state-of-the-art chatbots. Such improvements are reflected through a new human evaluation metric that we propose for open-domain chatbots, called Sensibleness and Specificity Average (SSA), which captures basic, but important attributes for human conversation.

Remarkably, we demonstrate that perplexity, an automatic metric that is readily available to any neural conversational models, highly correlates with SSA..."

Read more...

This is the 'Chinese Room' approach to social agency, consciousness not required.

I think the approach is architecturally self-limiting: the limit-point being suave, fluid, empty-headed gossip-grooming.

It will make Google a fortune.

Modelling China's new coronavirus

From the BBC.

"Lockdown measures are increasing across China's Hubei province to try to control the spread of a new virus that has left 17 people dead. Wuhan, Hubei's capital of 11 million people where the virus first emerged, has no trains or planes in or out. At least four other provincial cities are seeing clampdowns on transport.

"There are more than 500 confirmed cases of the virus, which has spread abroad, with Singapore, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam the latest affected."

Imagine a two-by-two matrix: one dimension is R₀, the basic reproduction number; the other dimension is the survival function showing lethality. Only the square with R₀ >> 1 and high lethality is a source of real concern. In that case the epidemic spreads fast and kills most of the victims.

One day we'll be able to model viruses and their mutation trees to determine whether there is an adjacent genotype to the day-zero virus which is much more dangerous. Today we have no idea - projections are just a matter of luck.

The current outbreak is rather benign so far.

"Most of the 17 victims were elderly and suffered from other chronic diseases including Parkinson's disease and diabetes."

However, there is clearly a selective advantage to any viral-mutation which more aggressively hijacks the host's body to make more virus copies - provided it doesn't kill the host too quickly. This virus currently has a long asymptomatic period, so it seems there is space for it to transition to a more lethal variant while maintaining transmission potency. We shall see.

Wash your hands - the face-masks are far from a panacea!