Everything we love about civilization is a product of intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an umbrella term for technologies that enable machines to mimic human intelligence, and consequently transform industries. These technologies include, but are not limited to, computer vision, language processing and machine learning.
Almost all the economic value created by AI today is through one type of technology, which learns from historical data (input) and helps you take better decisions (output) for the future. If you input an email, a model could tell you whether it’s spam or not. For speech recognition, you input an audio clip and output a text transcript. For machine translation, input an English sentence, output a Chinese sentence. For a self-driving car, input a picture of what’s in front of your car and your radar readings and output the position of the other cars.
The technical term is supervised Machine Learning, an idea that by itself is enough to transform multiple industries.
The technical ideas have, for the most part, been around for decades, but we have only recently brought enough computation power and data to this form of AI, in combination with mathematical advances, to make it work really well.
Around 2012 AI researchers started using NVIDIA's GPUs (Graphics Processing Unit) to train their AI models, resulting in multiple (70 times more) computation power in comparison to the CPUs.
Data is experience and just like humans AI learns from it. Whether the experiences comes from customer behaviors or production equipment, that experience is necessary for an AI to learn. As you are aware of data has exploded during the last decade(s) and will continue to do so.
Data curiosities
Algorithms are improving every day and the advancements have been extra ordinary during the last decade. Better algorithms means more efficient, precise AI models. Think of it as high quality parts in an engine where we want to make the best use of our fuel (data).