DailyPost 192
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) – INFLECTION POINT
With lots of false starts in AI, termed as AI Winter , in last 7/8 decades, it seems to have reached the Inflection Point, the AI Spring , as is popularly known, where the delivery of AI products have started to make an impact to large number of customers. The launch of Apple’s Siri in 2012 can be termed as the watershed moment with one product after another getting added to the AI stack. The consequent R & D with huge commercial success in mind is fueling this trend, having the capability to impact every sector & also provide the first movers with the competitive advantage.
It’s a leap from humans telling the computer how to act through softwares to computers learning how to act through algorithms. Machine Learning at its core, is algorithms that learn from examples/experience (data sets) rather than relying on hard coded & predefined rules. Better and broadly available algorithms has facilitated this trend, the conspicuous examples being Berkeley’s Caffe, Google’s TensorFlow & Torch used by Facebook.
The huge creation of data and its availability & its usability is of primordial importance to sustain this trend. Immense computing capability readily available & its predefined growth, has provided the comfort and finality to this trend. In 2016, China’s Sunway TaihulLight tripled the world’s top Supercomputing speed to 93 petaflops.
Company after company have followed suit. Google’s PageRank in 1998 to RankBrain in 2015 has been a great success story, AI provides the company its biggest dividends. Apple as one of AI pioneers has gobbled up AI products like Vocal IQ, Perceptio, Emotient, Turi and Triplejump. This consolidates the present trend. According to CEO, Satya Nadella, Microsoft is “democratizing AI.” IBM research has 3000 researchers worldwide, with more than 1,400 patients in cognitive computing & 1,200 in next generation cloud in last ten years has done yeomen service to perpetuate this trend. AI is already being officered as a service. The AI Spring has arrived.
AI IS THE FINAL FRONTIER.
Sanjay Sahay