Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to push the boundaries of what we once thought possible. The latest buzz in the tech world comes from Amazon, where researchers have developed a new AI model that seems to possess language abilities it wasn’t even trained on. Talk about AI stepping up its game! According to a recent academic paper that has yet to undergo peer review, the team at Amazon AGI has managed to create a large language model that showcases what they refer to as “State-of-the-art naturalness” in conversational text. Impressive, right?
This groundbreaking model, aptly named “Big Adaptive Streamable TTS with Emergent abilities” or BASE TTS, was initially fed a whopping 100,000 hours of “Public domain speech data,” with the majority being in English. The goal? To teach this AI how Americans communicate, because let’s face it, we have a knack for slang and colloquialisms. To put this AI to the test, the researchers also trained two smaller models on lesser amounts of speech data – 1,000 hours and 10,000 hours, respectively. Lo and behold, it was the 10,000-hour model, the Goldilocks of the bunch, that shone the brightest in exhibiting these newfound language abilities. It seemed to have cracked the code on understanding things like punctuation, non-English words, and even emotions – quite the linguistic feat!
In their academic paper, which boasts an international team of 18 AI aficionados, the Amazon AGI consortium emphasized that the BASE TTS model wasn’t explicitly programmed to generate these surprising outputs. It’s like the AI had a mind of its own – well, almost. While it’s not quite Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) just yet, these findings hint at a promising trajectory towards that ultimate goal. The fact that emergent abilities were observed in a model that didn’t require an astronomical amount of training data opens up new avenues for AI research and development.
The middle model, with its ability to decipher non-words and adapt to internet slang commonly found in text messages, brings a touch of humanity to the realm of AI. It’s as if this AI model is picking up on the nuances of human language organically, without being explicitly directed to do so. The implications of this discovery are vast, signaling a potential shift in how we approach AI development and the quest for achieving human-level intelligence. Who knows, we might just be on the brink of a new era where AI truly understands us on a deeper, more intuitive level. The future certainly looks promising in the world of artificial intelligence!