Google's multitasking neural net can juggle eight things at once

Deep-learning systems tend to be one-trick wonders: they're great at the task they've been trained to do, but pretty awful at everything else. Now a new neural network from Google suggests that AI can be taught to multitask after all. Most deep-learning systems are built to solve specific problems, such as recognising animals in photos from the Serengeti or translating between languages. But if you take, for instance, an image-recognition algorithm and then retrain it to do a completely different task, such as recognising speech, it usually becomes worse at its original job. Humans don't have that issue.