Why Computers Don't Need to Match Human Intelligence

Speech and language are central to human intelligence, communication, and cognitive processes. Understanding natural language is often viewed as the greatest AI challenge--one that, if solved, could take machines much closer to human intelligence. In 2019, Microsoft and Alibaba announced that they had built enhancements to a Google technology that beat humans in a natural language processing (NLP) task called reading comprehension. This news was somewhat obscure, but I considered this a major breakthrough because I remembered what had happened four years earlier. In 2015, researchers from Microsoft and Google developed systems based on Geoff Hinton's and Yann Lecun's inventions that beat humans in image recognition.