Chatbots are dumb, but wait until they learn how to negotiate for you
Chatbots were supposed to be a big part of our AI-powered future, but they’ve mostly fallen flat. Scratch the surface of any online bot selling you takeout or flights abroad, and you’ll usually find drop-down menus repackaged as questions. To get chatbots to the next level (and make them genuinely useful), they’ll need to be given new skills — like memory, and the ability to reason. Adding these new cognitive abilities is closer than you think.
Facebook is one of the biggest players in this domain. They launched their own chatbot assistant M (though humans do all the tough tasks); built an open-source framework for teaching bots; and today, researchers from the company’s FAIR lab have…
