Google's machine-learning software has learned to replicate itself

Back in May, Google revealed its AutoML project; artificial intelligence (AI) designed to help them create other AIs. Now, Google has announced that AutoML has beaten the human AI engineers at their own game by building machine-learning software that's more efficient and powerful than the best human-designed systems. An AutoML system recently broke a record for categorizing images by their content, scoring 82 percent. While that's a relatively simple task, AutoML also beat the human-built system at a more complex task integral to autonomous robots and augmented reality: marking the location of multiple objects in an image. For that task, AutoML scored 43 percent versus the human-built system's 39 percent.