The AI of science fiction just got one step closer - The Washington Post

Also see Bot 'breaks' Captcha, making the most annoying thing on the internet pointless (The Independent)

"Researchers at Vicarious, a Californian artificial intelligence firm funded by Amazon founder (and Washington Post owner) Jeffrey P. Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, have just published a paper documenting how they were able to defeat CAPTCHA using new artificial-intelligence techniques. Whereas today’s most advanced AI (artificial intelligence) technologies use neural networks that require massive amounts of data to learn from, sometimes millions of examples, the researchers said their system needed just five training steps to crack Google’s reCAPTCHA technology. With this, they achieved a 67 percent success rate per character — reasonably close to the human accuracy rate of 87 percent. In answering PayPal and Yahoo CAPTCHAs, the system achieved an accuracy rate of greater than 50 percent.

The CAPTCHA breakthrough came hard on the heels of another major milestone from Google’s DeepMind team, the people who built the world’s best Go-playing system. DeepMind built a new artificial-intelligence system called AlphaGo Zero that taught itself to play the game at a world-beating level with minimal training data, mainly using trial and error — in a fashion similar to how humans learn."

The AI of science fiction just got one step closer - The Washington Post