The Most Impressive Things A.I. Accomplished This Year

And then there's Facebook's self-taught chatbots, which fall on a slightly different scale of self-taught abilities. The two A.I. agents, Bob and Alice, started out speaking in English but then...developed their own language to speak in. "Agents will drift off understandable language and invent codewords for themselves," said Dhruv Batra, visiting research scientist from Georgia Tech at Facebook A.I. Research, in an interview with FastCo Design. While this got a lot of blowback in the press ("creepy" was a common headline descriptor), it's actually a fairly common occurrence. A.I. systems evolve using a rewards-based system, and if there's no benefit from a particular course of action, they'll try something else instead.