Facebook's AI is learning by reading loads of children's books

That's the advice you might give a student struggling for a better grip on the ins and outs of language. On 18 February, Facebook released several data sets that it uses to train its home-grown neural networks. One is packed with the text of classic novels, such as The Jungle Book, Peter Pan, Little Women, A Christmas Carol and Alice in Wonderland. There are more than a hundred stories in all, taken from the free online library Project Gutenberg. It's a reading list for fledgling AI (see box below).