Etzioni and the non-for-profit Allen Institute recently ran a contest, inviting nearly 800 teams of researchers to build AI systems that could take an eighth grade science test, and today, the Institute released the results: The top performers successfully answered about 60 percent of the questions. In other words, they flunked.
For Etzioni, this five-month-long contest serves as a reality check for the state of artificial intelligence. Yes, thanks to the rise of deep neural networks, networks of hardware and software that approximate the web of neurons in the human brain, companies like Google and Facebook and Microsoft have achieved human-like performance in identifying images and recognizing spoken words, among other tasks. But we’re still a long way from machines that can really think, from AI that can carry on a real conversation, even from systems that can pass a basic science test.
via Wired
