AI2's Unified-IO can complete a range of AI tasks – TechCrunch

The Allen Institute for AI (AI2), the division within the nonprofit Allen Institute focused on machine learning research, today published its work on an AI system, called Unified-IO, that it claims is among the first to perform a "large and diverse" set of AI tasks. Unified-IO can process and create images, text and other structured data, a feat that the research team behind it says is a step toward building capable, unified general-purpose AI systems. "We are interested in building task-agnostic [AI systems], which can enable practitioners to train [machine learning] models for new tasks with little to no knowledge of the underlying machinery," Jaisen Lu, a research scientist at AI2 who worked on Unified-IO, told TechCrunch via email. "Such unified architectures alleviate the need for task-specific parameters and system modifications, can be jointly trained to perform a large variety of tasks and can share knowledge across tasks to boost performance." AI2's early efforts in building unified AI systems led to GPV-1 and GPV-2, two general-purpose, "vision-language" systems that supported a handful of workloads including captioning images and answering questions.