Artificial Intelligence Systems Manage More Complex Tasks

Artificial-intelligence systems can do increasingly complex tasks but they can't yet figure much out on their own without help from humans. In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Nature, researchers at Alphabet Inc.'s Google DeepMind describe experimental software that they say gets closer to that goal and could be more accurate and less costly than current systems. "There's a lot of things it could be used for," he said. One obvious future application is "chatbots," software that answers questions autonomously, he said. The new DeepMind prototype couples so-called artificial neural networks -- which are widely used for image and speech recognition -- with an external memory.