Artificial Intelligence — A quick overview
🧠 What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?
There are many definitions of what is AI. I’ve found this one from Jeremy Achin, the CEO of DataRobot (an AI company) quite interesting. For him:
An AI is a computer system that is able to perform tasks that ordinarily require human intelligence… Many of them are powered by machine learning, some of them are powered by specifically deep learning, some of them are powered by very boring things like just rules.
So, strictly speaking, an AI is not an “intelligent” program. It can be as simple as a set of instructions.
There are two types of AI:
- “Weak” AI are AI limited to specific tasks. E.g: Siri is a weak AI because it cannot answer questions outside of some limits.
- “Strong” AI is a hypothetical AI that could rival human intelligence by understanding and learning any tasks that humans can. Currently, no one has developed a functional strong AI.
So, for the rest of this article, we will focus on “weak” AI.
🤷♀️ What are common AI techniques?
As mentioned by Jeremy Achin, AI can be built using different techniques.
Two of them are Machine Learning and Deep Learning (a subset of Machine Learning). Machine Learning and Deep Learning algorithms are both learning from data to improve their performance without human intervention.
However, Deep Learning can go further than Machine Learning and solve more complex problems, using Neural Networks, that mimic how brain cells work.
🗿 Milestones of AI
- 1950: Alan Turing explores the notion of AI for the first time, by asking a simple question. “Can Machines Think?”
- 1955: 1st Artificial Intelligence Program by Herbert Simon, Allen Newell, and John Shaw.
- 1997: Gary Kasparov, then chess world champion, is defeated by Deep Blue, an AI program.
- 2012: IBM’s Watson wins Jeopardy!. Unlike chess, it requires creative thinking and the use of language.
- 2016: AlphaGo defeated the world’s Go champion.
⏭ The Future of AI
In 2019, the AI market represented $39.9 billion, and is now expected to grow 40% every year until 2027… Thus 2020s will likely be the decade of AI.
AI will be used in a wide range of applications: tasks automation, cybersecurity, IoT, fraud detections, facial recognition… Almost any business could benefit from it.
That’s it for today… if you’re still hungry for cool tech stuff, we invite you to check out our weekly newsletter “The Seed”. It provides easy-to-read content focusing on Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Technology
