“In a paper released Thursday, the OpenAI team demonstrates that we can get those results from an “unsupervised” AI — meaning the system learned from reading 8 million internet articles, not from being explicitly trained for the tasks. Their AI advances the state of the art — in some cases, by a lot. The OpenAI team says their system sets a record for performance on so-called Winograd schemas, a tough reading comprehension task; achieves near-human performance on the Children’s Book Test, another check of reading comprehension; and — most thrillingly to me — generates its own text, including highly convincing news articles and Amazon reviews.”