Artificial Intelligence: All the Stats, Facts, and Data You'll Ever Need to Know

What Is Artificial Intelligence (AI)?

The replication of the intellect of humans by software-coded algorithms is known as artificial intelligence or AI. These days, this code can be found in embedded firmware, consumer apps, cloud-based enterprise systems, and even embedded software.

The year 2022 saw the widespread adoption of Generative Pre-Training Transformer applications, which propelled AI into the mainstream. The frequently used programs are ChatGPT and OpenAI's DALL-E text-to-image converter. The majority of customers associated ChatGPT with artificial intelligence because of its pervasive attraction. That still only makes up a tiny percentage of the applications of AI technology that exist today.

The capacity for reasoning and making decisions that maximize the likelihood of accomplishing a given objective is the ideal quality of artificial intelligence. Machine learning (ML), a subtype of artificial intelligence, is the idea that computer programs can automatically learn from and adapt to new data without help from humans. This automatic learning is made possible by methods based on deep learning, which absorbs enormous amounts of unstructured data, including text, photos, and video.

The history of AI: How did we get here?

1940s

In the 1940s, the first computers were constructed. Even though many of the concepts have been present for longer, World War II's demands resulted in significant investments in research and technology improvement. The Abacus and other instruments for specialized computations had been available for thousands of years, but these early room-sized computers were the first true general-purpose computers.

Scholars have long conjectured about the viability of employing a machine to simulate the human brain. The 1940s saw the initial theories of neural networks, one of the models employed in modern artificial intelligence. 

1950s and '60s

Computing Machinery and Intelligence is published by Alan Turing (link goes outside of ibm.com). In this work, Turing—often referred to as the "father of computer science" and famed for cracking the German ENIGMA code during World War II—poses the query, "Can machines think?"  Next, he presents what is now referred to as the "Turing Test," in which a human interrogator attempts to discern between a computer-generated text response and a human-written response.

John McCarthy first used the phrase "artificial intelligence" at Dartmouth College's inaugural AI conference. (McCarthy would later create the language Lisp.) Later that year, the first artificial intelligence (AI) software program, the Logic Theorist, is created by Allen Newell, J.C. Shaw, and Herbert Simon.

1970s

That didn't work out as planned, and The First AI Winter was caused by sluggish development, technical issues, and other mishaps. Government funding and research interest declined, and some issues persisted unsolvable due to inadequate computer capacity.

1980s 

Stanford hosted the AAAI's inaugural conference. The XCON (expert configured) was the first expert system to be released into the commercial market. It was created to make ordering computer systems easier by automatically selecting parts according to the requirements of the user. 

The Fifth Generation Computer project received $850 million from the Japanese government, or more than $2 billion in today's currency. Their goal was to build computers that were capable of human-level reasoning, language translation, and human-to-human conversation.

The AAAI warns of an impending "AI Winter" that would result in a decline in funding and interest and greatly increase the difficulty of research. 

Late 1990s – present

AI has advanced steadily since then. The most significant cultural turning points occurred when IBM's Watson defeated Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings on Jeopardy! in 2011 and Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997. However, the steady progress made in the background is far more significant.

These days, computers are quick enough and strong enough to analyze the massive amounts of data required for computer vision, natural language processing, and neural networks to function. It's not that early researchers couldn't see ChatGPT; rather, it was a lack of resources that prevented them from developing it. 

Additionally, AI has been subtly and gradually incorporated into a large number of the everyday things we use. Consider Google. Its decision-making processes for selecting websites to highlight, serving advertising, and classifying emails as spam have evolved so much over the last 20 years that they are truly best described as artificial intelligence. While it developed the transformer architecture in 2017, which serves as the foundation for GPT and other big language models, its actual realization took five years. 

How will AI change the world?

Artificial intelligence has the potential to transform many aspects of our lives, including our employment, health, privacy, media consumption, and commute.

 

Think about how some AI systems might affect the entire world. To go to work, people can use voice assistants on their phones to hail rides from autonomous cars. Once at work, they can employ AI tools to increase their efficiency even further.

In addition to potentially saving many lives, doctors and radiologists might be able to diagnose cancer with fewer resources, uncover chemicals that could lead to more effective drugs, and detect genetic patterns associated with diseases.

The potential for privacy violations from facial recognition and surveillance technologies is another ethical concern with AI; some academics are advocating for a total prohibition of these uses.

Know these seven categories of artificial intelligence:

Types of Artificial Intelligence

 Know these seven categories of artificial intelligence:

1. Narrow AI: AI is not able to learn on its own; it is made to do extremely particular tasks.

2. Artificial General Intelligence:  AI is created with human-like capacity for learning, thought, and performance.

3. Artificial Superintelligence: AI can outperform humans in terms of knowledge and skills.

4. Reactive Machine AI: AI can react instantly to outside inputs but is not able to learn or retain knowledge for later use.

5. Limited Memory AI: Artificial intelligence (AI) can learn and prepare for new tasks by storing knowledge.

6. Theory of Mind AI: AI can sense human emotions, react to them, and carry out the functions of robots with limited memory.

7. Self-Aware AI: The ultimate form of AI is emotional understanding coupled with self-awareness and human-level intelligence.

The Bottom Line

The rapidly developing field of artificial intelligence (AI) aims to replicate human intelligence in machines by giving them the ability to carry out a variety of activities, from easy to difficult. AI includes several subfields that enable systems to learn and adapt in new ways from training data, such as machine learning (ML) and deep learning. 

Numerous industries, including healthcare, banking, and transportation, can benefit greatly from its extensive uses. AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is a theoretical notion that might accomplish every intellectual work that a human can do.

Its development goes from weak AI, which is focused on specific activities like voice assistants, to strong AI. Even while AI presents tremendous improvements, it also brings up issues related to employment, privacy, and ethics. AI has enormous promise for the future, but its effects on society and ethics must be carefully considered as well.