What Is AI All About And How Is AI Bringing Change?

AI is a confusing term for many of us and with the advancement in tech and new innovations driving changes in the way the world around us functions and behaves , it is correct to say that even without our realization, AI is already present and is deeply embedded in the world around us, in form of self-driving cars, super computers, smart phone apps and even the phone’s calculator.

The applications of AI is increasing and we can expect to see some interesting and intelligent machines around us very soon. Many fear and worry about increasing use of AI. Our perception on AI is mainly biased and sourced from the sci-fi movies, where evil machines try to take over humans. Discussions on robots and machines replacing humans workforce is quite common.

Undoubtedly, AI is the most evolving field of technology and you will be surprised to know how deeply embedded it is already in our lives. Apollo 11 (the computer that put man on moon) operated on 64 KB memory and now 64 GB memory is easily available in iPhones, which is technically, 100 million times more computational power and 1 million times more memory is at your disposal.   

Artificial Intelligence - what is it all about?

 Human intelligence is multifaceted and is a combination of diverse activities whereas AI is only focused on few components of human intelligence.  

Artificial intelligence is a broad term that most importantly denotes the machine’s ability to function like human intelligence and can be programmed to carry out complex procedures characteristic to human intelligence like - reasoning, collection and analysis of complex data and deriving useful insights from it.

The expectation from AI enabled systems in future is to successfully demonstrate reasoning, planning, learning, problem solving, perception, motion, the ability to generalize, learn from the past mistakes and to an extent creativity, without the necessity of any human intervention.

Where we currently stand in the field of artificial intelligence technology?

 AI is further divisible in two categories -

l Narrow Artificial Intelligence

l General Artificial Intelligence

What are we experiencing in today’s technology comes under the term narrow AI.

Narrow AI is prevalent in

l Intelligent systems of speech and language recognition of Apple.

l iPhone’s Siri virtual assistant.

l Vision-recognition systems present in self-driving cars.

These systems using narrow AI can only be taught and programmed to perform some of the specific tasks and unlike humans they can’t learn new things on their own, whereas artificial general intelligence can be equivalent to adaptable human intelligence.

Development of artificial general intelligence is not possible yet as the current knowledge and understanding of human brain and its function is limited.  

How machine learning is fueling the resurgence of AI?

 In machine learning, large amount of data is used to carry out specific tasks.

l Machine learning happens with the help of interconnected layers of algorithms, known as neurons and neural networks.

Input data is passed between these algorithms and the neural networks are trained to carry out a specific task.

l Deep learning is a part of machine learning and the ability to perform tasks like computer vision and speech recognition are a result of deep learning neural networks.

What can machine learning do?

 Machine learning can automate security patching, backups and optimize database query performance. Many companies are offering end-to-end platform to build AI-driven applications. By using the latest open source frameworks you can leverage the data to build machine learning models.

Deep learning is the biggest breakthrough in the field of AI research. Easy availability of data fuels further research and analysis in the field of deep learning. The presence of parallel computing power is also the reason behind the progress in research and development in deep learning field.  

GPU clusters which are available as cloud services over the internet are the most powerful systems for training machine learning and are used to train machine-learning models. Google and Microsoft have already switched to training machine learning models.

Recent developments and what changes AI is bringing in the world?

 Companies are keen to build, deploy and manage AI-powered solutions.

Many AI-powered solutions are available that come with intelligent features, well suited to perform repetitive manual tasks, eliminating the chance of human error so, the companies will be able to focus on high-value activities.

With the ongoing digital disruption many companies are willing to transform themselves into intelligent data-driven enterprise with the help of AI, machine learning, robotic process automation.

Major tech firms are focusing to develop robust machine learning tech. Google’s DeepMind AI AlphaGo is the latest research in this field.

GPU arrays are available for training and running machine learning models and access to these are provided on all major cloud platforms - Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.

Microsoft Cortana, Google Assistant, Alexa from Amazon and Siri from Apple are visible manifestations of AI.

Among the countries, China is investing heavily in AI and leading in the world leaving the US behind.

Chinese firms are investing heavily in AI. By 2020, China is planning to turn AI as a core industry with an estimated worth of $22 billion.

Machine learning and big data are at the forefront of recent technological advancements and we can expect that several industries will immensely benefit from it.

Governance, economy, health care - every domain is using smart, multi-variable regression models performing predictive analysis by using big data. Health care is one industry that’s positively benefited from AI.  

When artificial intelligence will take care of all the repetitive work, human intelligence can be better used to explore the other aspects like creative expression.

In the end

At the heart of all this, years back everything that was started just with a few lines of code is now ever-expanding and with unmatched computational power, machines can be trained to make better decisions and can process humongous amount of real time and historical data with prediction models.

AI will definitely bring a lot of changes in the world. It might surpass the human brain or we will be able to produce extra ordinary intelligence to travel to future and look beyond galaxies. Only time will tell but artificial intelligence facilitated by machine learning promises a lot.