His intelligence is real. But he is not.

My whole life, I pictured Artificial Intelligence to be what the future will be like without a thought of how it would be done. After watching Terminator, I pictured an earthful of Arnold’s and after watching I, Robot, I pictured heartless robots whose will was dictated by bits, bytes and statistics that humans could not understand. My friend’s father has worked on robotics and AI for most of his life and too many times we talk theory and philosophy about AI and robots. Most of the time, conversation turns to the possibilities and potential of artificial intelligence. We imagine a world where a lot of the world’s misery can be tended to automatically.

I thought that it may be just a dream. A dream that might not happen, especially not in this century. That is until last friday when Gregory Renard (Angie: “Siri before Siri”) and Louis Monier (AltaVista: “Google before Google”) came to @Holberton School to talk about Deep Learning. The talk took the whole day, with very interesting perspectives from the leaders in AI and Deep Learning and interactive hands-on experiments using ConvNetJS. ConvNetJS is a very interesting tool to teach the fundamentals of Deep Learning in a simple fun game..Um I mean interface.

Renard and Monier opened up my eyes about the fathomless immensity of AI and Deep Learning. Their presentation showed me all the utilization possibilities of Deep Learning and how reachable AI and machine learning are. While the concept of robots/AI being on the same level as humans might not ever be reachable, I believe that even now, many machines are actually more “intelligent” than humans. But, what is “intelligence”?