[dmreedy]

I don't mean to imply AlphaZero is not impressive; it surely is. Nor do I mean to imply that any of these advances aren't impressive. I do mean to imply that "closed-world games with well-defined rules" is a relatively small subdomain of problems. And that BERT looks pretty different from AlphaZero.

[tialaramex]

The post you disputed pointed out that there aren't separate AIs needed for things like Go or Chess. Because there aren't (any more) the Deepmind work showed that you can just generalize to learn all games in this class the same way.

You claimed that "different architectures" are needed. Not true. And further you claimed this is true even for "each subdomain". This would have been a fair point in 1989. Traditional chess AIs approach the opening very differently for example, relying on fixed "books" of known good openings. But AlphaZero since it is a generalist doesn't do this, it plays every part of a match the same way.

Now you've gone from asserting that Chess and Go need separate AIs to claiming that since BERT and AlphaZero are different software it makes your point. Humans pretty clearly don't have a single structure that's doing all the work in both playing Go (AlphaZero) and understanding English (BERT) either - so that's a pretty bold bit of goalpost moving.