I was on a DARPA neural network advisory panel in 1998 and 1999, and I used simple 1 hidden layer or 2 hidden layer back prop networks for several projects.

My mind is blown by both the computational tricks for training many layer networks and the advances of using GPUs to train large networks. We built our own neural network hardware that was excellent for the time, but the progress in the last decade is enormous.

Still I also believe in the power and utility of so-called 'symbolic AI', but I think I am in the minority.

The next step from generating good quality questions that sound natural, is to make sure the the questions are up to date and topical. This means keeping up with current affairs, memes, popular cultue, and other trends. Adding questions about "which politician is in trouble for x" really only remain relevant for about a week or two and sit in a different category than these pure fact style questions presented here.

It would be great to see this research team or others to continue in this direction, and look at an increasingly broad metrics of what makes a "good" question, in addition to whether the English phrasing sounds good.

Nevertheless, this really does sound great.

Seeding a dataset with human labels, then generating new, better data is pretty cool. Similar to deep mind watching go games, then learning to play better than said games. Add to which, humans can't tell the difference between the human generated data and algo generated data.

We're about 3 months from where you can bootstrap a system like microsofts with freely available code and data. From there, if "memory modules" start working better so models can "remember specific context" (it can already remember general context), you'll have a bot that's a pretty good model for passing the Turing test.

I'm defining a practical Turing test as text-based, human gets 5 questions, other party replies 5 times, then human must predict: human/not human.

Using an example from the paper:

Q: who’s an american singer that plays pop music?

A: nikki flores

So, the generated question and answer match, but the answer isn't exclusively the right answer. There are thousands of "right answers".

They do note this: "We have also observed that the questions are often ambiguous: that is, one can easily come up with several possible answers that may fit the specifications of the question."

But they don't say anything more about it. I suppose that's just out of scope for them, and something someone else works on?

factoid - an invented fact believed to be true because it appears in print.

2 : a briefly stated and usually trivial fact.

    Of similar form to, but not the same as.