OpenAI has trained an unsupervised language model that can perform basic reading comprehension, summarize text, answer questions, and generate coherent paragraphs; as Andy and Dave discuss, the bigger news came from OpenAI’s decision to release a less-capable version of the GPT-2 model, “for the good of humanity,” as one news site claimed. IBM’s Project Debater lost a debate with champion debater Harish Natarajan, but more of the audience said Project Debater better enriched their knowledge on the topic. Princeton and Microsoft announce NAIL, an agent for playing general interactive fiction (such as the Zork series), and consisting of multiple Decision Modules for performing various tasks.

Part 2 will be posted next week.