Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
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Ed Burns
Nicole Laskowski, Senior News Director
Linda Tucci, Industry Editor -- CIO/IT Strategy
Machine learning enables software applications to become more accurate at predicting outcomes without being
explicitly programmed to do so. Machine learning algorithms use historical data as input to predict new output
values. This approach became vastly more effective with the rise of large data sets to train on. Deep learning, a
subset of machine learning, is based on our understanding of how the brain is structured. Deep learning's use of
artificial neural networks structure is the underpinning of recent advances in AI, including self-driving cars and
ChatGPT.
Indeed, advances in AI techniques have not only helped fuel an explosion in efficiency, but
opened the door to entirely new business opportunities for some larger enterprises. Prior to
the current wave of AI, it would have been hard to imagine using computer software to
connect riders to taxis, but Uber has become a Fortune 500 company by doing just that.
AI has become central to many of today's largest and most successful companies, including
Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft and Meta, where AI technologies are used to improve operations
and outpace competitors. At Alphabet subsidiary Google, for example, AI is central to its
search engine, Waymo's self-driving cars and Google Brain, which invented the transformer
neural network architecture that underpins the recent breakthroughs in natural language
processing.
Expensive.
Requires deep technical expertise.
Limited supply of qualified workers to build AI tools.
Reflects the biases of its training data, at scale.
Lack of ability to generalize from one task to another.
Eliminates human jobs, increasing unemployment rates.
Weak AI, also known as narrow AI, is designed and trained to complete a specific
task. Industrial robots and virtual personal assistants, such as Apple's Siri, use weak
AI.
Strong AI, also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), describes programming
that can replicate the cognitive abilities of the human brain. When presented with an
unfamiliar task, a strong AI system can use fuzzy logic to apply knowledge from one
domain to another and find a solution autonomously. In theory, a strong AI program
should be able to pass both a Turing test and the Chinese Room argument.
Type 1: Reactive machines. These AI systems have no memory and are task-specific.
An example is Deep Blue, the IBM chess program that beat Garry Kasparov in the
1990s. Deep Blue can identify pieces on a chessboard and make predictions, but
because it has no memory, it cannot use past experiences to inform future ones.
Type 2: Limited memory. These AI systems have memory, so they can use past
experiences to inform future decisions. Some of the decision-making functions in
self-driving cars are designed this way.
Type 3: Theory of mind. Theory of mind is a psychology term. When applied to AI, it
means the system would have the social intelligence to understand emotions. This
type of AI will be able to infer human intentions and predict behavior, a necessary
skill for AI systems to become integral members of human teams.
Type 4: Self-awareness. In this category, AI systems have a sense of self, which gives
them consciousness. Machines with self-awareness understand their own current
state. This type of AI does not yet exist.
DAVID PETERSSON
Supervised learning. Data sets are labeled so that patterns can be detected and used
to label new data sets.
Unsupervised learning. Data sets aren't labeled and are sorted according to
similarities or differences.
Reinforcement learning. Data sets aren't labeled but, after performing an action or
several actions, the AI system is given feedback.
Machine vision. This technology gives a machine the ability to see. Machine vision captures
and analyzes visual information using a camera, analog-to-digital conversion and digital
signal processing. It is often compared to human eyesight, but machine vision isn't bound by
biology and can be programmed to see through walls, for example. It is used in a range of
applications from signature identification to medical image analysis. Computer vision, which
is focused on machine-based image processing, is often conflated with machine vision.
Natural language processing (NLP). This is the processing of human language by a computer
program. One of the older and best-known examples of NLP is spam detection, which looks
at the subject line and text of an email and decides if it's junk. Current approaches to NLP
are based on machine learning. NLP tasks include text translation, sentiment analysis and
speech recognition.
Robotics. This field of engineering focuses on the design and manufacturing of robots.
Robots are often used to perform tasks that are difficult for humans to perform or perform
consistently. For example, robots are used in car production assembly lines or by NASA to
move large objects in space. Researchers also use machine learning to build robots that can
interact in social settings.
Self-driving cars. Autonomous vehicles use a combination of computer vision, image
recognition and deep learning to build automated skills to pilot a vehicle while staying in a
given lane and avoiding unexpected obstructions, such as pedestrians.
Text, image and audio generation. Generative AI techniques, which create various types of
media from text prompts, are being applied extensively across businesses to create a
seemingly limitless range of content types from photorealistic art to email responses and
screenplays.
AI is not just one technology.
Related Terms
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Automated machine learning (AutoML) is the process of applying machine learning (ML) models to real-world
problems using ... See complete definition
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situations where the ... See complete definition
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