“What is impressive is that PaLM has never seen parallel sentences between Bengali and English,” Pichai said at the event. “It was not explicitly taught to answer questions or translate at all. The model has brought all its capabilities together to answer questions correctly in Bengali, and we can extend the technology to more languages and other complex tasks.”
Jason Post, a Google spokesperson, told BuzzFeed News that the company has never claimed that it did not conduct PaLM training in Bengali. “While the PaLM model has been trained to complete a basic sentence in a wide range of languages (including English and Bengali), it has not been trained to know how to 1) translate between languages, 2) answer questions in a Q&A format, or 3) translate,” the Post said in a statement. Statement: “Cross-language information while answering questions.” “She learned these emerging abilities on her own, which is an impressive achievement.”
Emily M. Bender, professor and researcher at the University of Washington, wrote a Twitter topic around 60 minutes The clip took issue with Maneka’s comments. Bandar told BuzzFeed News that the software’s ability to translate “all Bengali languages” is “an unfounded and baseless claim.”
“What does ‘all Bengali’ actually mean?” Bandar tweeted. “How was this tested?” She also wrote that Maneka’s statement ignored or concealed the fact that Bengali scripts were present in the training data.
Bender tweeted that the term “emergent properties” seems to be the respectful way of saying AGI, which stands for artificial general intelligence, a hypothetical technology that can learn on its own and perform tasks better than humans. “It’s still bullshit,” she said.
Mitchell was equally vocal on Twitter. “Maintaining belief in ‘magical’ properties, and spreading them to millions (thanks for nothing @60Minutes!) serves Google’s PR goals,” Mitchell chirp. “Unfortunately, this is misinformation.”
Several other people in the tech space have also publicly criticized CBS and Google: