What happened?

DeepMind announced Gopher, a 280-billion-parameter AI natural language processing (NLP) model. Based on the Transformer architecture and trained on a 10.5TB corpus called MassiveText, Gopher outperformed the current state-of-the-art on 100 of 124 evaluation tasks. Read the entire article here: https://www.infoq.com/news/2022/01/deepmind-gopher/

Why is this important?

Language is the fundamental building block of all human cultures, it underlies our interactions with one another and shapes society as a whole. AI technology that can 'understand' language will begin to understand how we operate within complex systems on an emotional level; this could lead to some really amazing discoveries about ourselves or potentially dangerous misunderstanding if not used responsibly - imagine if computers knew more than just what their programmers wanted them too!