What is artificial intelligence and why do we need it?

First, Artificial Intelligence is not the artificial intelligence Hollywood would have us imagine it to be. When people talk about ‘volcanic’ changes in ‘AI’ they are talking about one particular field of technology: Machine Learning (and within that field, Deep Learning). Machine Learning is a very literal description of the technology it describes, that is a program written to learn and adapt. The pioneering technology within this field is the neural network (NN), which mimics (to a very rudimentary level) the pattern recognition abilities of the human brain by processing thousands or even millions of data points. Pattern recognition is pivotal in terms of intelligence.

A lot of people assume that we are developing general AI rather than applied AI (difference is explained very well here). Applied AI is intelligence, but in a very limited field and requires supervised training. For example, in recognizing human faces (Facebook), driving cars (Google Autonomous Cars), or what we do at The Graduate – namely matching teachers to students for optimal outcomes. A general AI on the other hand, is not limited to a narrow field where humans still have to impose certain rules before it can ‘learn’ (cars are not animals, etc.) It learns ‘unsupervised’. To clarify, there are hundreds of companies using applied AI (such as a vacuum cleaner that knows how to avoid your cat), there are none that have developed general AI (think Terminator).

We are getting closer to general AI though. There is a developing technology, “Adversarial Training of Neural Networks“, where the data from one machine learning program helps to train the other in a kind of closed loop. This is the technology that Google and Facebook have been flouting a lot recently. An example of this might be in medicine, where one ML program is used to diagnose a patient, and another is used to prescribe a treatment. The two programs may train each other in that correct treatments suggest correct diagnoses and the correct diagnosis may lead to different treatments, and so on…

lasteriided

mänguasjad

lastetooted