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There are three aspects about AI that could change the future of your business.
1. Humans can't go it alone
The scale of information growth – driven by the pace of information change – has reached the point where humans simply cannot handle it without the aid of intelligent computers, said Dr. Jim Hendler, director of the Rensselaer Institute for Data Exploration and Application (IDEA), who leads the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute project to explore new uses and directions for AI technology.
In the short term, AI will learn to do things like show us the social media posts we'll find more interesting, but, in the longer term, machines with AI capabilities will offer users much more, said Dr. Yann LeCun, director of AI research at Facebook and the Silver professor of computer science at New York University. He offered scenarios including "vision systems that can drive your car, a vacuum cleaner robot that will recognize your furniture and if there’s dirt on the ground, an autonomous lawnmower that will mow your lawn and not take out your flowers.” Eventually, such technology could revolutionize industries such as ground maintenance, he said.
2. AI technology is becoming more usable
AI technologies, such as neural networks, are beginning to turn the corner and become more usable. That’s how Google scientists built an AI system in 2012 that started to behave in the same way as a human web user—it began looking for cat videos on YouTube, without being given any information about how to identify one. When the scientists built a neural network of 16,000 computer processors with 1 billion connections and let it browse 10 million random YouTube thumbnails over three days, the system learned on its own to look for and recognize pictures of cats, writes Liat Clark in Wired UK. The New York Times reported that this neural network "performed far better than any previous effort by roughly doubling its accuracy in recognizing objects in a challenging list of 20,000 distinct items."
Of course, 10 million videos is a lot of data—big data, that is. But that's the level of information—in a variety of forms—that companies are working to analyze and process to make better-informed business decisions. Big tech companies such as Google and Facebook are focusing on AI research because they are the only businesses with the big data necessary to teach the AI systems, LeCun said.
3. There are new ways to approach AI
"Deep learning" provides a different way of approaching AI, Hendler said.
Previously, we taught machines which rules to follow. “In the end, these rules were too easy to break,” said Dr. Pedro Domingos, professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Washington. He blamed the failure on a “knowledge acquisition bottleneck.”
Now, with deep learning, machines themselves figure out which rules to follow based on data researchers feed them, Domingos said.
Looking further into the future and across a wide range of industries, AI could be the missing link for the companies struggling to get their arms around big data.
"The natural convergence of AI and big data is a crucial emerging technology space," Hendler said. "Increasingly, big businesses will need the AI technology to overcome the challenges or handle the speed with which information is changing in the current business environment."
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