Google says that with certain languages, its new system-dubbed Google Neural Machine Translation, or GNMT-reduces errors by 60 percent.įor now, it only translates from Chinese into English- perhaps a key translation pair in Google's larger ambitions. Modeled after the way neurons connect in the human brain, deep neural networks are the same breed of AI technology that identifies commands spoken into Android phones and recognizes people in photos posted to Facebook, and the promise is that it will reinvent machine translation in much the same way.

The technology that underpinned AlphaGo- deep neural networks-is now playing a very big role on Google Translate. Online translation couldn't help our story on the new wave in artificial intelligence, but the new wave in artificial intelligence is improving online translation. And today, as Google rolls out a new incarnation of its translation software, it comes with a certain irony. We ran it the through Google Translate, but it spat out some English that didn't quite make sense. But we also had a problem: the source of this news was in Korean, and no one in our office spoke the language. We needed to get his latest wins into the story. After playing AlphaGo, Lee said the machine opened his eyes to new ways of playing the ancient game, and indeed, it had. Even as it surpasses human talents, AI can also pull humans to new heights-a theme that ran through our magazine story. On a Friday in late April, we were about an hour away from sending this story to the printer when I got an email.Īccording to the email, Lee had won all five matches-and all against top competition-since his loss to AlphaGo.

The match between AlphaGo and Korean grandmaster Lee Sedol was so exhilarating, so upsetting, and so unexpectedly powerful, we turned it into a cover story for the magazine. Last March, a computer built by a team of Google engineers beat one of the world's top players at the ancient game of Go.

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