What it’s like to watch an IBM AI successfully debate humans

At a small event in San Francisco last night, IBM hosted two debate club-style discussions between two humans and an AI called "Project Debater." The goal was for the AI to engage in a series of reasoned arguments according to some pretty standard rules of debate: no awareness of the debate topic ahead of time, no pre-canned responses. Each side gave a four-minute introductory speech, a four-minute rebuttal to the other's arguments, and a two-minute closing statement.

Project Debater held its own.

It looks like a huge leap beyond that other splashy demonstration we all remember from IBM, when Watson mopped the floor with its competition at Jeopardy. IBM's AI demonstration today was built on that foundation, it had many corpuses of data...

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