Human Language Understanding & Reasoning

The last decade has yielded dramatic and quite surprising breakthroughs in natural language processing through the use of simple artificial neural network computations, replicated on a very large scale and trained over exceedingly large amounts of data. The resulting pretrained language models, such as BERT and GPT-3, have provided a powerful universal language understanding and generation base, which can easily be adapted to many understanding, writing, and reasoning tasks. These models show the first inklings of a more general form of artificial intelligence, which may lead to powerful foundation models in domains of sensory experience beyond just language.