One question that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella asks to test AI’s smartness – Times of India

It seems that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has one specific question to test the capability of a new AI model. The software giant’s CEO shared the same during an interview with Wired recently. “There is one query I always sort of use as a reference. Machine translation has been with us for a long time, and it’s achieved a lot of great benchmarks, but it doesn’t have the subtlety of capturing deep meaning in poetry,” Nadella told the website.
“Growing up in Hyderabad, India, I’d dreamt about being able to read Persian poetry—in particular the work of Rumi, which has been translated into Urdu and then into English. GPT-4 did it, in one shot. It was not just a machine translation, but something that preserved the sovereignty of poetry across two language boundaries. And that’s pretty cool,” he said.
As translations can be fickle, especially in poetry so Nadella termed this as the proper test of an AI model. For, he said that he wanted to gauge if GPT-4 would simply spit out a “machine translation” or preserve the “sovereignty,” as he put it, of Rumi’s work.
For those unaware, Jalaluddin Rumi, or Rumi as he’s most commonly referred to, was a Persian poet who lived during the early 13th century. His work is widely celebrated around the world.
The ultimate killer app
When asked about if AI has shunted the metaverse into some other dimension, he replied, “I still am a believer in [virtual] presence. In 2016 I wrote about three things I was excited about: mixed reality, quantum, and AI. I remain excited about the same three things. Today we are talking about AI, but I think presence is the ultimate killer app. And then, of course, quantum accelerates everything.”