Despite all the recent hullabaloo concerning artificial intelligence, in part fueled by dire predictions made by the likes of Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk, there have been few breakthroughs in the field to warrant such fanfare. The artificial neural networks that have caused so much controversy are a product of the 1950s and 60s, and remain relatively unchanged since then. The strides forward made in areas like speech recognition owe as much to improved datasets (think big data) and faster hardware than to actual changes in AI methodology. The thornier problems, like teaching computers to do natural language processing and leaps of logic remain nearly as intractable now as they were a decade ago.

This may all be about to change. Last week, the British high priest of artificial intelligence Professor Geoffrey Hinton, who was snapped up by Google two years back during its massive acquisition of AI experts, revealed that his employer may have found a means of breaking the AI deadlock that has persisted in areas like natural language processing.

The hope comes in the form of a concept called “thought vectors.” If you have never heard of a thought vector, you’re in good company. The concept is both new and controversial. The underlying idea is that by ascribing every word a set of numbers (or vector), a computer can be trained to understand the actual meaning of these words.

Now, you might ask, can’t computers already do that — when I ask Google the question, “Who was the first president of the United States?”, it spits back a short bit of text containing the correct answer. Doesn’t it understand what I am saying? The answer is no. The current state of the art has taught computers to understand human language much the way a trained dog understands it when squatting down in response to the command “sit.” The dog doesn’t understand the actual meaning of the words, and has only been conditioned to give a response to a certain stimulus. If you were to ask the dog, “sit is to chair as blank is to bed,” it would have no idea what you’re getting at.

Thought vectors provide a means to change that: actually teaching the computer to understand language much the way we do. The difference between thought vectors and the previous methods used in AI is in some ways merely one of degree. While a dog maps the word sit to a single behavior, using thought vectors, that word could be mapped to thousands of sentences containing “sit” in them. The result would be the computer arriving at a meaning for the word more closely resembling our own.

While this sounds well and dandy, in practice things will prove more difficult. For instance, there is the issue of irony, when a word is being used in more than just its literal sense. Taking a crack at his contemporaries across the pond, Professor Hinton remarked, “Irony is going to be hard to get, [as] you have to be master of the literal first. But then, Americans don’t get irony either. Computers are going to reach the level of Americans before Brits.” While this may provide some small relief to Hinton and his compatriots, regardless of which nationality gets bested by computers first, it’s going to come as a strange awakening when the laptop on the kitchen counter starts talking back to us.