Research in the field of machine learning and AI, now a key technology in practically every industry and company, is far too voluminous for anyone to read it all. This column, Perceptron, aims to collect some of the most relevant recent discoveries and papers -- particularly in, but not limited to, artificial intelligence -- and explain why they matter.

Over the past few weeks, researchers at Google have demoed an AI system, PaLI, that can perform many tasks in over 100 languages. Elsewhere, a Berlin-based group launched a project called Source+ that's designed as a way of allowing artists, including visual artists, musicians and writers, to opt into -- and out of -- allowing their work being used as training data for AI.

AI systems like OpenAI's GPT-3 can generate fairly sensical text, or summarize existing text from the web, ebooks and other sources of information. But they're historically been limited to a single language, limiting both their usefulness and reach.

Fortunately, in recent months, research into multilingual systems has accelerated -- driven partly by community efforts like Hugging Face's Bloom. In an attempt to leverage these advances in multilinguality, a Google team created PaLI, which was trained on both images and text to perform tasks like image captioning, object detection and optical character recognition.

Image Credits: Google

Google claims that PaLI can understand 109 languages and the relationships between words in those languages and images, enabling it to -- for example -- caption a picture of a postcard in French. While the work remains firmly in the research phases, the creators say that it illustrates the important interplay between language and images -- and could establish a foundation for a commercial product down the line.

Speech is another aspect of language that AI is constantly improving in. Play.ht recently showed off a new text-to-speech model that puts a remarkable amount of emotion and range into its results. The clips it posted last week sound fantastic, though they are of course cherry-picked.