AI Progress In the Real World

“AI made great progress in the last 5-10 years”

• You might have heard this statement many times. 

•  Does it mean the Terminator or Chitti the robot will be a reality soon? 

•  Let’s find it out by knowing about two different types of AI today.

• All the applications of AI you see today are very specific. 

•  They have been carefully crafted to achieve a very specific end goal.

•  For example, An AI designed to play chess can play the game extremely well  

•  It can even beat human chess champions. But such AI can only play chess.

• Using face unlock feature, your phone gets unlocked when you look at it.  

•  Such facial recognition AI is designed only to recognise faces

• Netflix suggests movies that you might like, sometimes even better than your friends  Such recommendation system is designed only to recommend movies

• All the above applications and All the AI applications you see in your day-to-day life 

•  They fall under a type of AI called Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) 

• All the progress that happened in the AI so far is in ANI

• Next there is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) 

•  AGI is AI that can understand, learn and perform all intellectual tasks just like humans do

• A very little progress has been made in the direction of AGI. 

•  Scientists are still debating whether AGI will ever become a reality. 

•  But many of them believe that it's not possible in the coming 10-15 years for sure