Facebook wants chatbots to learn the way people do

Current deep learning technology is not advanced enough for computers to understand language, a major figure in the field said today. The ability to learn the way people learn -- through observation and experience -- is what Facebook will use to teach chatbots and computers to carry on a conversation like a human, said Yann LeCun, the head of Facebook's artificial intelligence (A.I.) research lab. LeCun spoke about A.I. and steps being taken to make virtual assistant M less reliant on human training at the 2016 Wired Business Conference, as Wired reported. Humans have played a role in the decision-making process for Facebook's M since the bot debuted last year, before the launch of the company's bot platform. Facebook has been researching ways to make machines understand language more independently.