Let's all take a deep breath and stop freaking out about Facebook's bots 'inventing' a new language

Tesla CEO Elon Musk made headlines last week when he tweeted about his frustrations that Mark Zuckerberg, ever the optimist, doesn't fully understand the potential danger posed by artificial intelligence. 

So when media outlets began breathlessly re-reporting a weeks-old story that Facebook's AI-trained chatbots "invented" their own language, it's not surprising the story caught more attention than it did the first time around.

Understandable, perhaps, but it's exactly the wrong thing to be focusing on. The fact that Facebook's bots "invented" a new way to communicate wasn't even the most shocking part of the research to begin with. Read more...