Research Trends

Three research teams from Microsoft, Google, and Baidu have surpassed human baselines on SuperGLUE NLP tasks.

From AlphaGo to MuZero and Beyond

In 2016, DeepMind unveiled AlphaGo, the first AI program capable of defeating human players at Go—a board game long held as the highwater benchmark in the field. Then, in 2018, the team created a successor called AlphaZero, which learned how to master Go, chess and shogi (an ancient Japanese chess game)—from scratch, without human trainers. Last year, DeepMind published a stunning paper in the journal Nature describing MuZero, which mastered all previous tasks plus Atari without needing to be told the rules. This was a significant step toward AI systems functioning in unknown environments—and yet another sign that general-purpose algorithms are on the horizon.