Many people suggest the lack of emotion and sentience as a limitation in Artificial Intelligence. AI is more popular for addressing shortcomings in humans, such as improving productivity and efficiency, meaning robots and technology can help produce more output in less time. However, Meta’s latest announcement unravels a new side of AI that involves it cooperating with humans in a strategy game called Diplomacy.
Diplomacy is a game that involves players cooperating by sharing motivations and points of view to construct plans and alliances. According to Meta, Diplomacy has been considered an impossible challenge for AI due to the amount of human-level understanding and language it requires. Nevertheless, its launch of CICERO, an AI agent that has excelled at Diplomacy and negotiation skills with people, is an attempt to inculcate strategic reasoning in AI. Meta mentions:
"Unlike games like Chess and Go, Diplomacy is a game about people rather than pieces. If an agent can"t recognize that someone is likely bluffing or that another player would see a certain move as aggressive, it will quickly lose the game. Likewise, if it doesn"t talk like a real person -- showing empathy, building relationships, and speaking knowledgeably about the game -- it won"t find other players willing to work with it."
CICERO paves the way for development in AI, which, through reasoning and natural language processing, can create assistants that cooperate with individuals. Currently, CICERO can just be used to play Diplomacy; the game was played online on webDiplomacy.net. It also ranked among the top 10% of players who took part in more than one game and achieved more than twice the average score of human players.
Meta added that CICERO’s ability to converse in natural language is so effective, that other players in Diplomacy preferred allying with the AI rather than other humans. Thus, Meta mentions how CICERO holds the potential to transform into an AI assistant with whom people can engage in a long-term conversation while learning a new skill.
Percy Liang, Director of the Center for Research on Foundation Models at Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered AI, stated:
“Open science and Open source are crucial for the health of the AI research ecosystem. It is great to see Meta AI continuing its culture of openness with this release, which will allow researchers to build on top of this work.”
Meta is inviting researchers to submit proposals to their Request for Proposal (RFP) in the field of human-AI cooperation through natural language. Additional information about the technology behind CICERO can be found here.