Right now, artificial intelligences (AI) tend to fall into one of two categories – freakishly impressive, like the Google AI that can invent its own AI, or hilarious rubbish, like the one failing miserably at designing inspirational posters. Facebook recently developed an AI that falls into the former, and it turns out to be so good at its job that the plug was pulled before it could get any further.
As reported by Fast Co Design, Facebook researchers had been working on an AI that was designed to make digital communication more efficient. In fact, they had developed several and let them talk to each other using, at first, English.
For a while, the conversations were gibberish – at least to most people. Here’s an example of one of the conversations that took place as a couple of AIs were learning how to negotiate and strike deals on virtual commodities: