Facebook, or as we're supposed to call them now Meta, announced earlier today that their CICERO artificial intelligence has achieved "human-level performance" in the board game Diplomacy, which is notable for the fact that's a game built on human interaction, not moves and manoeuvres (like, say, chess). If you've never played Diplomacy, and so are maybe wondering what the big deal is, it's a board game first released in the 1950s that is played mostly by people just sitting around a table (or breaking off into rooms) and negotiating stuff. There are no dice or cards affecting play; everything is determined by humans communicating with other humans. So for an AI's creators to say that it is playing at a "human level" in a game like this is a pretty bold claim! One that Meta backs up by saying that CICERO is actually operating on two different levels, one crunching the progress and status of the game, the other trying to communicate with human levels in a way we would understand and interact with.

A recent trove of documents leaked from Facebook demonstrated how the social network struggles to moderate dangerous content in places far from Silicon Valley. Internal discussions revealed worries that moderation algorithms for the languages spoken in Pakistan and Ethiopia were insufficient, and that the company lacked adequate training data to tune systems to different dialects of Arabic. Meta Platforms, Facebook's owner, now says it has deployed a new artificial intelligence moderation system for some tasks that can be adapted to new enforcement jobs more quickly than its predecessors because it requires much less training data. The company says the system, called Few-Shot Learner, works in more than 100 languages and can operate on images as well as text. Facebook says Few-Shot Learner makes it possible to automate enforcement of a new moderation rule in about six weeks, down from around six months.

This week, Facebook responded with its new state-of-the-art, open-source chatbot, Blender. "This is the first chatbot to blend a diverse set of conversational skills -- including empathy, knowledge, and personality -- together in one system," Facebook researchers boasted in a blog post. Read more: Facebook Says Its'Blender' Chatbot Is the Most Humanlike Ever The paper Recipes for Building an Open-domain Chatbot is on arXiv, and the code can be found here.

The company's new policy was first reported by The Washington Post. Facebook was heavily criticized last year for refusing to take down an altered video of Speaker Nancy Pelosi that had been edited to make it appear as though she was slurring her words. At the time, the company defended its decision, saying it had subjected the video to its fact-checking process and had reduced its reach on the social network. It did not appear that the new policy would have changed the company's handling of the video with Ms. Pelosi. The announcement comes ahead of a hearing before the House Energy & Commerce Committee on Wednesday morning, during which Ms. Bickert, Facebook's vice president of global policy management, is expected to testify on "manipulation and deception in the digital age," alongside other experts. Because Facebook is still the No. 1 platform for sharing false political stories, according to disinformation researchers, the urgency to spot and halt novel forms of digital manipulation before they spread is paramount.

On Nov. 13, Facebook announced with great fanfare that it was taking down substantially more posts containing hate speech from its platform than ever before. Facebook removed more than seven million instances of hate speech in the third quarter of 2019, the company claimed, an increase of 59% against the previous quarter. More and more of that hate speech (80%) is now being detected not by humans, they added, but automatically, by artificial intelligence. The new statistics, however, conceal a structural problem Facebook is yet to overcome: not all hate speech is treated equally. The algorithms Facebook currently uses to remove hate speech only work in certain languages. That means it has become easier for Facebook to contain the spread of racial or religious hatred online in the primarily developed countries and communities where global languages like English, Spanish and Mandarin dominate.

University of Washington researcher Luke Zettlemoyer will head up the Seattle lab and keep his faculty position, while Carnegie Mellon researchers Abhinav Gupta and Jessica Hodgins will spearhead the Pittsburgh office and keep their university affiliation on a part-time basis. Companies like Facebook, Microsoft, and others say the ability for AI researchers to continue their academic work has proven to be a valuable tool for recruiting the best talent. At the same time, large tech companies have learned that allowing their researchers to publish much of their work in peer-reviewed academic journals and speak at academic conferences is also key to those people agreeing to accept positions in the private sector. In a blog post, Facebook AI Research (FAIR) head Yann Lecun noted that it's a common practice for the company's researchers to stay involved with universities. Lecun himself has a dual appointment, splitting his time between Facebook and New York University.