The Debater

Last week I watched a new documentary from IBM Research called The Debater. 

The film gives a behind-the-scenes look at the development and testing of a new AI that can debate humans in natural language. 

Building a machine that can argue with people is a true “grand challenge” and marks a break with earlier Humans vs AI competitions. 

Previous battles like IBM Deep Blue vs Garry Kasparov (chess, 1996), IBM Watson vs Ken Jennings (Jeopardy, 2011), and Google AlphaGo vs Lee Sedol (go, 2017) were all based on games with strict rules. 

But debating is a more open field.  

The outcome of a debate is judged by people, in this case, based on the debater’s ability to move an audience to support or oppose a resolution. 

I won’t give too much away here, but the old-way/new-way moment becomes supereal when the debaters meet on stage for the first time and the AI says to the human "Greetings Harish. I suspect you’ve never debated a machine. Welcome to the future.”

The exciting on-stage conclusion comes after a years-long battle led by a restlessly-minded technologist based at IBM Jerusalem, and an eclectic team of AI researchers, ML and NLP experts, coders, debating SMEs and a global support community of debate professionals and enthusiasts.

In the end, everyone wins because no matter who won the debate (I won’t tell you here) the level of public discourse is lifted. And a grand challenge is met. 

You can learn more about The Debater, and watch the film here … 

https://www.research.ibm.com/artificial-intelligence/project-debater/film/.