An A.I. Just Developed Its Own Totally New Language

New research from OpenAI and UC Berkeley has created A.I. agents that can form and use their own new language, without instruction, whenever they need to. The languages are systematic and roughly grammatical, and even include aspects of non-verbal communication like body language! It all makes for an incredible glimpse into how (and why) language may have arisen during biological evolution, and it shows the nuanced insight we can derive from modern learning agents. Like so many studies that set out to elicit a specific A.I. behavior, this one began by creating a rough metaphor for real life. The experiment sets its A.I. agents in a simulated physical world containing landmarks at fixed positions, and then gives them the ability to roam freely within this two-dimensional space. The agents were then given a goal, usually to send another agent to a specific place in the world, and a set of nonsense symbols each could "say" aloud so the others could "hear" it.