Wise to move on artificial intelligence
Source: Juha Saarinen
Creation of a superior being that can out-perform humans is underway so developers better not get left behind
AI will continue to creep into our lives, just like cloud computing has. Photo / Getty Images
AI will continue to creep into our lives, just like cloud computing has. Photo / Getty Images
The end goal of computing and information technology has always been to create a superior being that can gather, store and process vast amounts of information faster than its human master's eyes can blink.
Disobedient and random humans are not as well-suited as machines to sift through large information troves. Knowledge is power, though, which can be bestowed on those who develop artificial intelligence systems that tirelessly process information.
Huge amounts of money and massive effort is being poured into developing artificial intelligence systems. Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Google and other large tech companies are racing to grab the lead when it comes to machine and deep learning, automated reasoning and natural language computing.
This is happening across the IT industry: NVIDIA, which is best known for its fast video cards for gaming, released the new Tesla P100 graphics processing unit recently. This has 15 billion transistors, and reportedly cost US$2 billion ($2.9 billion) to develop.
NVIDIA doesn't see the Tesla P100 used for video games, though, but for deep learning and artificial intelligence applications. Eight P100s in the small NVIDIA DGX-1 "supercomputer in a box" system can be had relatively cheaply - US$129,000 - and provide the sort of performance systems costing millions deliver.
AI will continue to creep into our lives, just like cloud computing has. Microsoft is betting on "conversations as a platform", for instance an immediate future in which users interact with bots developed as intermediaries for large computer systems (tinyurl.com/nzh-msconvos).
What you and I see of AI currently is only moderately usable - personal digital assistants such as Apple's Siri and Microsoft's Cortana try to figure out what exactly it was you said.
Sometimes they're spot on, other times hilariously wrong, like when you try to send a text with "Hey Siri" in a noisy environment (apologies, family and friends, I was researching this column, and hadn't suffered a brain malfunction or downed three pints of gin before sending those messages).
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