AI models are becoming better at answering questions

Late last year, the Allen Institute for AI, the research institute founded by the late Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, quietly open-sourced a large AI language model called Macaw. Unlike other language models that’ve captured the public’s attention recently (see OpenAI’s GPT-3), Macaw is fairly limited in what it can do, only answering and generating questions. But the researchers behind Macaw claim that it can outperform GPT-3 on a set of questions, despite being an order of magnitude smaller.

Answering questions might not be the most exciting application of AI. But question-answering technologies are becoming increasingly valuable in the enterprise. Rising customer call and email volumes during the pandemic spurred businesses to turn to automated chat assistants — according to Statista, the size of the chatbot market will surpass $1.25 billion by 2025. But chatbots and other conversational AI technologies remain fairly rigid, bound by the questions that they were trained on.

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