Finding the limits of NLP
AA: The next question is related to NLP, something that you’re quite familiar with. There have been amazing advances. However, one thing I want to ask you is this: what are the real challenges and limits, and will machines ever be able to understand language?
CM: With the advent of NLP, people began to understand how to model sequences and structures. I’m not sure I would call that understanding. On the other hand, does the average undergraduate who takes a psychology class actually understand it?
With what NLP has become, we can do a lot more things product-wise, because there are a lot of interesting things you can do with a product. When you read your Gmail, NLP is quite good at being able to figure out the next sequence of words you want to say. Is that understanding, or is it just surface-level pattern-matching?
What’s happened – and this is where a lot of my research with WeightWatcher comes into play – is...