Meta's new learning algorithm can teach AI to multi-task

Data2vec is part of a big trend in AI toward models that can learn to understand the world in more than one way. "It's a clever idea," says Ani Kembhavi at the Allen Institute for AI in Seattle, who works on vision and language. "It's a promising advance when it comes to generalized systems for learning." An important caveat is that although the same learning algorithm can be used for different skills, it can only learn one skill at a time. Once it has learned to recognize images, it must start from scratch to learn to recognize speech.