Tamanna Biswas, EOI, 23 June 2024: With the advent of the 21st century, the whole world has witnessed intense transformations in all fields including education, international trade, economy, technology and society. Today, the world thrives on technology. And AI, or artificial intelligence, is the biggest technological revolution of the 21st century. It has the potential to shatter almost every aspect of human existence. AI is a branch of computer science that aims to form intelligent machines and tools that are programmed to think like humans and imitate their behavior. It involves the same characteristics present in machines such as knowledge, reasoning, problem solving, perception, learning, planning, and the ability to manipulate and move objects. It is the disruption of human intelligence processes by machines based on computer systems.
It all began in 1950. A question crossed the mind of a computer scientist: “Will there be a digital computer that can perform well at the imitation game?” Later, John McCarthy, widely known as the father of AI, coined the term artificial intelligence as part of a proposal at the Dartmouth Conference in 1956. In the same year, the first AI lab was established by MIT. The year 1975 saw the first powerful use case of AI. MYCIN was showcased by Stanford University and helped doctors identify bacterial infections such as meningitis. It opened new horizons in the world of medicine. Since then, AI research has made great strides, leading to the development of many practical applications.
One of the earliest successful applications of AI was the development of expert systems, which are computer programs designed to mimic the decision-making abilities of human experts. Another important advancement in AI was the creation of artificial neural networks, which are computer programs designed to simulate the functions of the human brain.
These networks are used in a wide range of applications, including image and speech recognition, natural language processing, and even playing games like chess, to recognize patterns, classify data, and make decisions based on the data they were trained on. AI saw a resurgence in popularity in the 1980s and 1990s, in part due to the development of machine learning algorithms. These types of algorithms are used in a wide range of applications, including language translation and fraud detection. In 1987, interest and investment in AI again declined. In 1996, the world chess champion was defeated by IBM's chess computer. In 2002, Amazon made the big decision to replace human editors with the foundation of their AI system, incontrovertibly showing how AI could help business. That same year, Apple introduced Siri, the first voice-based conversational interface. In 2016, AI progressed to the next level of competence when Google's AI machine, AlphaGo, beat the world champion of Go, the world's most difficult strategy game.
In recent years, AI has continued to make rapid progress, leading to the invention of SEER in 2018. SEER (Simulative Emotional Expression Robot) is an animatronic humanoid robot that can generate gaze and emotional expressions through the integrated design of modeling, mechanisms, materials, and computing, making it more animated, realistic, and impressive. One of the most significant developments in AI in recent years is the rise of deep learning, a type of machine learning based on artificial neural networks with many layers. Deep learning has been used to achieve state-of-the-art results in a wide range of applications, including natural language processing and self-driving cars.
At the beginning of 2021, the invention of DALL-E is one of the biggest achievements in the field of AI. It is a neural network that can generate images from text captions and was created by Open AI. Automation is on the list of the next biggest AI achievements of 2021. It is a brain-computer interface that manages brain activity. In 2023, Gemini was announced by Google. It is an LLM created by its subsidiary Google Deep Mind during the Google I/O keynote and is now available in multiple languages and more than 150 countries. Google Gemini models are used for a variety of purposes, including understanding text, images, audio, and video. Gemini's multimodal nature also helps in combining these different types of inputs to generate an output. It was predicted that by 2024, AI will be integral to every part of business, including healthcare, finance, and transportation, accounting for 25% of total spending on AI solutions. And these predictions have become a reality. Some experts believe that AI could lead to the development of fully autonomous robots that can perform tasks without human intervention. (The author's views are personal.)
