AI progress comes in fits and starts. You hear nothing for months and then, suddenly, the limits of what seems possible are burst asunder. April was one of those months, with two major new releases in the field stunning onlookers.
The first was Google’s PaLM, a new language model (the same basic type of AI as the famous GPT series) that shows a pretty stunning ability to comprehend and parse complex statements – and explain what it’s doing in the process. Take this simple comprehension question from the company’s announcement: