https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/mind-blowing-ai-announcement-from-google-you-probably-gil-fewster
"Google Translate invented its own language to help it translate more effectively.
What's more, nobody told it to. It didn't develop a language (or interlingua, as Google call it) because it was coded to. It developed a new language because the software determined over time that this was the most efficient way to solve the problem of translation."
Nope, didn't miss it. Saw it last week.
Mind blowing nevertheless.
Hehe, not my title, but as you say ...
We discussed it here
http://th3core.com/talk/threadwatch/google-ai-goes-a-bit-'off-piste'/
That article is way over the top. What happened is super interesting, but it isn't mind-blowing sci-fi novel stuff like the article would have you believe. It's great, it's awesome, it's evolutionary (not revolutionary) and it points to a future that is hard for us to imagine outside of science fiction in terms of translation, search, information curation, knowledge, education, etc etc.... but read the thread linked above for a more realistic take on what this is really about.
A future where machine translation actually works? I've been waiting for that for a while. ::)