AI: A Casual Exploration

Browsing through my social media feed, my attention was captured by Google's Gemini Ad. The relatable and compelling message made me stop and think about the omnipresence of artificial intelligence in our lives today.

But what exactly is AI? Artificial intelligence or AI can be viewed as an umbrella term that identifies technology able to mimic human intelligence through the use of " algorithms, data, and computational power. The Goal for AI is for machines or software to perform tasks that typically require human intelligence such as learning, reasoning, problem solving, perception, and language understanding."

With such advances it no wonder companies are pouring large amounts of resources and funding into AI technology. We can clearly see Google's advancements in AI are impressive, but they are just the tip of the iceberg. Elon Musk has Grok which was released by his company xAI. Mark zuckerberg has Meta AI who released llama 3 a more than capable openly available LLM, who's ingenuity stands to hold his legacy and invite extraordinary progress towards AI. Sam Altman from OpenAI is pushing boundaries with Chat-GPT technology. These tech giants are engaged in a fierce competition, each striving to outdo the other and offer the most precise and advanced AI solutions to the market.

But despite their different approach and algorithms, these tech giants and their companies share a common belief in the immense potential of artificial intelligence. The vision they hold is not just about creating smarter algorithms that can or more efficient systems; it is about revolutionizing the way we interact with technology and the world around us. AI is not just a tool; it is a gateway to a future where machines can augment human capabilities and drive innovation.

“AI has the potential to change the world in ways that we can’t even imagine. It has the power to create new ideas, products, and services that will make our lives easier, more productive, and more creative. It also has the potential to solve some of the world’s biggest problems, such as climate change, poverty, and disease." - Bill gates  

Artificial intelligence has the remarkable capacity to extend far beyond the confines of answering our questions or curating the ideal social media feed. The potential of AI is vast and multifaceted, encompassing a wide array of applications and benefits across various industries and fields. In healthcare, AI can revolutionize diagnostics, treatment planning, and patient care through advanced algorithms that can analyze complex medical data with unprecedented speed and accuracy. Moreover, in the realm of finance, AI is reshaping the landscape of investment strategies, risk management, and fraud detection by leveraging predictive analytics and machine learning algorithms to make informed decisions in real time. With all of these advancements happening wouldn't the question then arise, how would jobs look like with AI's integration? I mean AI is invading healthcare as mentioned and finance so there are people behind these fields doing the job and changing along AI. Or AI might just as Well come to change what jobs might look like Sam Altman a tech giant from OpenAI made a point on this. He believes that future "jobs might look very different than what todays perspective of a real job looks like". I think his sentiment might just trancend from the work place maybe jobs won't be the only thing that will look different in the future.There are so many possibilities and effects AI can have. It's exciting what this field might bring to the future.

These are all current perspectives and possibilities of AI. But this field has been around for quite a while. Lets look into the past a bit. look into the history of AI. we'll begin with Alan Turing. Alan turing was a man that "published a paper that is now recognized as the foundation of computer science." He also continues to be foundational to this field because he was the one who came up with a test now called the Turing Test. This test aims to determine whether or not an AI has achieved human level intelligence its the test most AI go through even to this day.Then in 1956 Standford professor John McCarthy among others established artificial intelligence as a field and coined the term, during the Dartmouth conference. "In 1966 Eliza one of the first chatbots is able to mimic a psychotherapist. AI hits a pause from the 1970s-1980s. In 1997 Deep Blue a chess computer wins over a human. 1988 google search engine is launched to the public.In 2011 we experience Siri an intelligent assistant and we witness another super computer named Watson win in a quiz show. In 2014 Alexa technology moves into peoples homes. In 2016 Tay is one of the first chatbots to be reconfigured because of inappropriate remarks. In 2017 AlphaGo wins yet another game against humans. and in 2018 we experience the first initiation into establishing ethnic guidelines." 2019 Google AI and langone medical center's deep learning algorithm outperformed radiologists in detecting lung cancers. 2020 Open AI released the GPT-3 LLm consisting of 175 billion parameters to generate humanlike text models. That same year Nvidia announced the beta version of its Omniverse platform to create 3D models in the physical world. DeepMind's AlphaFold systems won the critical assessment of protein structure prediction protein-folding contest. 2021 Open AI introduced the Dall-E multimodal AI system that can generate images from text prompts. 2022 OpenAI released ChatGPT to provide a chat-based interface to its GPT-3.5 LLM. 2023 OpenAI announced the GPT-4 LLM that receives both text and image prompts. 2024 Meta releases LLama 3.

Now we've taken a look at the gravitational pull AI is now having on us and we've taken a look at AI's past. so the concluding thoughts might just be that this field is mesmerizing. Each of us experience these artificial intelligence programs differently as each our questions or image visualizations wants are different but we might all just share the common perspective that AI is becoming a part of us.

Note: How has AI impacted you?

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