All right, don’t panic, but computers have created their own secret language and are probably talking about us right now. Well, that’s kind of an oversimplification, and the last part is just plain untrue.
But there is a fascinating and existentially challenging development that Google’s AI researchers recently happened across.You may remember that back in September, Google announced that its Neural Machine Translation system had gone live.
It uses deep learning to produce better, more natural translations between languages. Cool!Following on this success, GNMT’s creators were curious about something. If you teach the translation system to translate English to Korean and vice versa, and also English to Japanese and vice versa… could it translate Korean to Japanese, without resorting to English as a bridge between them?
They made this helpful gif to illustrate the idea of what they call “zero-shot translation” (it’s the orange one):
As it turns out — yes! It produces “reasonable” translations between two languages that it has not explicitly linked in any way. Remember, no English allowed.
But this raised a second question. If the computer is able to make connections between concepts and words that have not been formally linked… does that mean that the computer has formed a concept of shared meaning for those words, meaning at a deeper level than simply that one word or phrase is the equivalent of another?
In other words, has the computer developed its own internal language to represent the concepts it uses to translate between other languages? Based on how various sentences are related to one another in the memory space of the neural network, Google’s language and AI boffins think that it has.
Google’s AI translation tool seems to have invented its own secret internal language | TechCrunch
