AIs That Understand Other AIs

Key Points:

• Collaborative Intelligence Through CALM: Google DeepMind’s Composition to Augment Language Models (CALM) enables multiple AI models to collaborate and develop a shared language, enhancing their ability to tackle complex tasks through collaborative intelligence.
• Transforming Business Interactions: CALM can revolutionize business operations by combining specialized models, such as those analyzing customer behavior and generating product descriptions, to create integrated systems capable of identifying trends and crafting tailored marketing content in real-time.
• Enhanced Capabilities: CALM combines a general-purpose anchor model with specialized augmenting models to perform tasks neither could achieve alone, such as code-to-text generation, by blending code understanding and language generation skills.
• Efficiency and Resource Conservation: CALM requires minimal additional data to represent combined model capabilities, conserving resources while maintaining the strengths of individual models. This aligns with Google’s focus on efficient compute.
• Technical Integration with Cross-Attention: CALM uses cross-attention mechanisms, allowing one model to focus on another’s information. This enables dynamic information exchange, creating a more powerful combined capability without updating individual models.
• Real-World Applications: CALM can enhance tasks like summarizing complex legal documents into plain language, leveraging the strengths of different specialized models to create accurate and accessible outputs.
• Reuse and Flexibility: CALM allows for the reuse of existing models, avoiding catastrophic forgetting and providing flexibility across organizational boundaries, enhancing control and integration of proprietary data or expertise.
• Broader Implications for AI Development: The CALM framework opens new possibilities for AI, allowing models to ‘speak’ to each other, combine their strengths, and address a wider range of tasks with expertise and precision.

The ability to translate complex, technical concepts into accessible, non-technical language for a range of audiences is an important human skill. Imagine two experts from vastly different fields—say, a technical designer and a marketing professional—coming together to co-create a product presentation for a non-expert audience. Their challenge is not just to share knowledge. To be an effective team they must develop a shared language that connects their disparate domains.

This collaborative process of translation and adaptation mirrors a new approach put forward by Google DeepMind. By augmenting large language models with each other, Composition to Augment Language Models (CALM) effectively enables these AI 'experts' to develop a common language, enhancing their ability to tackle complex tasks through collaborative intelligence.

In a business setting, this could revolutionize how companies interact with data. For instance, a retail giant could use CALM to blend a model specialized in analyzing customer behavior patterns with another that excels in generating engaging product descriptions. This would create an AI system capable of not only identifying emerging market trends but also creating compelling marketing content tailored to those trends, all in real-time.

This fusion of technical analysis and creative communication could transform data-driven strategies because the models could seamlessly match traditional predictive AI systems with generative systems to create narratives in real-time that are able to be configured for different audiences, who use different terminologies and have different mental models underpinning their decision making.