Meet the scientist teaching AI to police human speech

In his tiny corner of a seemingly endless expanse of workspace, the artificial-intelligence research scientist Alexis Conneau tapped his keyboard for a few seconds and then, suddenly, there everything was: Hundreds of billions of words, an immense torrent of human knowledge, raining down a window of his MacBook Pro screen.

For years, automated “crawlers” had been vacuuming the Internet — its old poems and angry comments and dessert recipes and everything else — into this gargantuan database in 100 languages: Arabic, Malagasy, Urdu and dozens more. Conneau couldn’t read it himself. But his creation, XLM-RoBERTa, had read it many times: This was its brain matter, the code with which the machine could, in some way, learn to emulate how people speak.