ERNIE

The long-dormant struggle to dominate the web-search business reignited in a display of AI-driven firepower — and hubris. Google and Microsoft announced competing upgrades powered by the latest generation of chatbots. Baidu, too, flexed its natural-language-processing muscles.

Language models like Bert, Ernie, and Elmo have achieved spectacular results based on clever pre-training approaches. New research applies some of those Sesame Street lessons into image processing.

Will reading soon become obsolete? A new system converts text articles into videos. VidPress, a prototype project from Chinese tech giant Baidu, currently generates more than 1,000 narrated video summaries of news stories daily.

The latest large, pretrained language models rely on trendy layers based on transformer networks. New research shows that these newfangled layers may not be necessary.

As language models show increasing power, a parallel trend has received less notice: The vogue for naming models after characters in the children’s TV show Sesame Street.