Here are five important AI stories from the week. RoBERTa, the Next Best Advance in NLP (Facebook) Since Google launched BERT late last year, there have been several improvements along the way such as OpenAI’s GPT-2 and XLNet. Facebook has launched its own improvement, RoBERTa, which produced state-of-the-art results on the most popular NLP benchmark known as GLUE. To build this, Facebook made some adjustments to Google’s BERT architecture but also trained on more data and for longer. Google’s and Facebook’s commitment to BERT matters because BERT is inherently a much more scalable solution, relying on semi-supervised NLP approaches (e.g., partially labeled datasets) versus the more mainstream supervised approaches (which requires lots and lots of hard to come by LABELED data).