AI competition is a rerun of last century's space race

IT'S BEEN another year of relentless artificial-intelligence hype and incremental AI achievement. Machines still beat humans only in carefully constructed environments or at narrow tasks. The good news is that, as the technology progresses, the race for leadership is still wide open, and even Europe, where politicians fret that the continent is lagging behind China and the US, is still quite competitive.

According to the Artificial Intelligence Index 2018 annual report, whose steering committee includes leading AI scholars such as Yoav Shoham of Stanford University and Erik Brynjolfsson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, AI has progressed on all the measures tracked. Some of the metrics, from the number of published papers and conference attendance, to mentions on corporate earnings calls and in parliamentary hearings, measure the hype. Others reflect improving performance. In 2018, AI has gotten more accurate and much faster at image detection. It's also improved at parsing the grammatical structure of sentences, answering multiple-choice questions and translation. Whether this progress brings us closer to truly superhuman AI is a different matter.

On the translation front, a measure called Bilingual Evaluation Understudy is used to determine accuracy. It compares machine-translated sentences to those rendered by human experts, and last year almost half the machine translations between English and German news articles measured up to the human ones. Last year, Microsoft announced with much fanfare that its AI did just as well as humans in translating news from Chinese into English. But the underlying paper reports much lower scores for the Chinese translations than for the separately published German ones, and accuracy scores from human evaluators of between 50 per cent and 70 per cent. Machine-translation algorithms still produce plenty of gibberish and are really mostly useful, in a limited way, to humans with some understanding of both languages and the context.