Common Sense Comes to Computers

One evening last October, the artificial intelligence researcher Gary Marcus was amusing himself on his iPhone by making a state-of-the-art neural network look stupid. Marcus' target, a deep learning network called GPT-2, had recently become famous for its uncanny ability to generate plausible-sounding English prose with just a sentence or two of prompting. When journalists at The Guardian fed it text from a report on Brexit, GPT-2 wrote entire newspaper-style paragraphs, complete with convincing political and geographic references. Marcus, a prominent critic of AI hype, gave the neural network a pop quiz. Surely a system smart enough to contribute to The New Yorker would have no trouble completing the sentence with the obvious word, "fire."