The buried line in the new Facebook report about one-on-one chatbots conversations provides a great glimpse into the future of the language. In the report, researchers at the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research Lab describe the use of machine learning to negotiate with their "dialogue agents." At one point, the researchers wrote, they had to adjust one of their models, otherwise the bot-to-bot dialogue "developed their language for negotiation, which led to the disagreement from human language to agents. "Instead they had to use the so-called fixed supervised model. In other words, the model that allowed the two bots to communicate -- and to use machine learning to continually redirect strategies for that conversation -- led the bots to communicate in their non-human language.

Although Facebook's bargain-hunting bots aren't a sign of an imminent singularity -- or anything even approaching that level of sophistication -- they are significant, in part because they prove once again that an important realm we once assumed was solely the domain of humans, language, is definitely a shared space. This discovery also highlights how much we still don't know about the ways that artificial intelligences (AIs) think and learn, even when we create them and model them after ourselves.

A buried line in a new Facebook report about chatbots' conversations with one another offers a remarkable glimpse at the future of language. In the report, researchers at the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab describe using machine learning to train their "dialog agents" to negotiate. At one point, the researchers write, they had to tweak one of their models because otherwise the bot-to-bot conversation "led to divergence from human language as the agents developed their own language for negotiating." They had to use what's called a fixed supervised model instead. In other words, the model that allowed two bots to have a conversation--and use machine learning to constantly iterate strategies for that conversation along the way--led to those bots communicating in their own non-human language.

A buried line in a new Facebook report about chatbots' conversations with one another offers a remarkable glimpse at the future of language. In the report, researchers at the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research lab describe using machine learning to train their "dialog agents" to negotiate. At one point, the researchers write, they had to tweak one of their models because otherwise the bot-to-bot conversation "led to divergence from human language as the agents developed their own language for negotiating." They had to use what's called a fixed supervised model instead. In other words, the model that allowed two bots to have a conversation--and use machine learning to constantly iterate strategies for that conversation along the way--led to those bots communicating in their own non-human language.