Beginner Question: What is Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial intelligence has recently caused quite a stir in the media with Elon Musk’s OpenAI beating the pros in DOTA 2 or artificial intelligence recreating the periodic table in a matter of hours. It is impossible to spend the day on the Internet without finding at least one article that talks about a new feat achieved in the field. In fact, artificial intelligence is not just a distant dream now but it is well integrated into our lives and many apps and online services we use include YouTube and Facebook. This makes it important for us to understand what Artificial Intelligence is and how it works if we use applications and services so often that they make use of AI to improve our experience.

In a nutshell, artificial intelligence involves creating computing systems that are perfectly capable of performing a number of tasks that are usually associated with human abilities such as thinking, understanding, analyzing, and more. Think of OpenAI beating the pros in a DOTA 2 game. It’s a complex game that requires you to adapt to the situation as it arises. Now imagine pitting a computer against a human in a scenario where the combinations are endless. How did this happen?

The way computer codes have always worked is that humans define everything for the computer and just feed it to the computer, which can then perform a very limited number of tasks based on the information it received. Here, it is a human being who is defining all the possibilities. But with Artificial Intelligence, humans can simply develop a system that can teach itself to define other possibilities that humans might not have thought of.

For example, instead of giving a computer 10 photos of an apple and then asking it to select one of those apples from a group of photos, you input all possible examples of an apple into a computer, regardless of size, shape, and size. color, and “teach” him to recognize patterns and decide for himself if something is an apple or not. Facebook uses a very similar technique when it suggests tags on the photos you upload.

Artificial intelligence uses huge amounts of data, discovers patterns in that data, and then figures out a way to use the data to solve a given problem. It can be extremely useful when it comes to increasing efficiency and saving time mainly because it’s much faster than humans and doesn’t get tired, it can add much more to existing intelligence by finding new patterns and solutions, it’s a lot more accurate than human beings and one of the most important factors is that it learned and grew by itself, that is, it is capable of learning itself from existing and new data.
Artificial intelligence has been growing at an enormous rate, penetrating a number of fields, including human resources, finance, law, education, security, and healthcare. This has been possible mainly due to huge developments in hardware (imagine the processing power required to analyze all that data) and sub-fields like Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing.

There has been quite a bit of debate about the ethical aspect of Artificial Intelligence, particularly about data collection methods and about the security aspect of it. But the fact is that it is one of the most amazing discoveries or developments that humanity has ever achieved, and it is revolutionizing each and every sector. Being cost effective and much more efficient, we can definitely expect to see massive advancements.