A different kind of hammer

Avalon Nuovo for Quanta Magazine

Transformers, artificial lifeforms consisting of Decepticons and Autobots, bitter antagonists forever fighting one another on the planet Cybertron, also enable AI to better understand the vagaries of reality in real-time as needs warrant.

To whit ...

Imagine going to your local hardware store and seeing a new kind of hammer on the shelf. You’ve heard about this hammer: It pounds faster and more accurately than others, and in the last few years it’s rendered many other hammers obsolete, at least for most uses. And there’s more! With a few tweaks — an attachment here, a twist there — the tool changes into a saw that can cut at least as fast and as accurately as any other option out there. In fact, some experts at the frontiers of tool development say this hammer might just herald the convergence of all tools into a single device.

A similar story is playing out among the tools of artificial intelligence. That versatile new hammer is a kind of artificial neural network — a network of nodes that “learn” how to do some task by training on existing data — called a transformer. It was originally designed to handle language, but has recently begun impacting other AI domains.

Samuel Velasco/Quanta Magazine. Source: Dive into Deep Learning

Not the complete solution to AI at the level of HAL but it's a start.

HAL 9000