Google unveils 'Pathways', a next-gen AI that can be trained to multitask

Today's AI models, according to Google's AI lead and co-founder of the Google Brain project, Jeff Dean, are at the one-trick pony phase – they are "typically trained to do only one thing". But a new approach called Pathways could provide something akin to a trainable dog that can do multiple tricks. Dean describes Pathways as a "next-generation AI architecture" that "will enable us to train a single model to do thousands or millions of things." Pathways can remove the limits of an AI model's capacity to respond to information from just one sense and allow it to respond to multiple senses, such as text, images and speech. "Pathways could enable multimodal models that encompass vision, auditory, and language understanding simultaneously," Dean explains.