Tuesday, October 24, 2017

Rise of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence also known as A.I. The textbook definition of A.I. is to enable computers to do things that are done by people. Many tech giants now are willing to invest a lot in A.I. because of all the possibility of things it can do ranging from face-scanning smartphones to self driving vehicles. These tech giants are willing to pay high salaries for people with A.I. talent.

A.I. is the future and these tech companies knows it too. According to the New York Times, people with any type of A.I. knowledge depending on Ph. Ds are less can be paid from $300,000 to $500,000 and get company stock. There is a huge shortage of talent and all the companies are competing for the talents. This doesn't just include tech companies like Facebook, Google, or etc, but companies in the auto industry are also interested in building the first self-driving car.

Artificial intelligence is more than just building the next big smart phone app. A.I. is based on mathematical techniques called deep neural networks. These networks are made up of mathematical algorithms that can learn on their own by analyzing data. For example, if given a couple thousands of photos of dogs, neural networks can find patterns and learn how to recognize a dog. Tech companies are trying to implement this technique into phones for face recognition. There are already a couple of A.I. examples in real life. The Amazon Echo, for example can identify commands spoken to it.

Amazon, the online mega-retailer, is investing $1.5 million dollars to improving A.I. With online shopping algorithms and the creation of Alexa, Amazon's A.I. personal assistant used in the Amazon Echo, A.I. is becoming an integral part of their business. Amazon plans to build a new Amazon Research Center near Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany. The new research center will focus on machine learning and machine vision. Amazon named two directors to its center. The first is Professor Bernhard Schölkopf and Professor Michael J. Black. Amazon goal is to help increase the international importance of A.I. learning. 

A.I. can be used way more than just tech companies. NVIDIA, chipmaker, has announced that it will start training developers in computer learning for healthcare and cancer research. They currently use its Tesla K80 GPU to train computers to detect breast cancer. Training more developers will allow NVIDIA to improve and deploy more of its GPU chips. 

In my opinion, I think this is all inevitable and it's good to start early. As technology continue to evolve, adopting A.I. inevitable for many companies. There are a couple of companies right now already implementing a small form of A.I. such as Amazon's Echo. In order to keep up with its competition, other retailers must also start implementing their own version of A.I. I think that when companies are training, developing new centers, and investing in A.I. is a good start. They want people aware that A.I. is the next big thing and want to raise awareness. This will not only affect technology people, but everybody too because the use of A.I. is limitless. Every industry in the near future will probably start using some sort of A.I.


1. What do you guys think are the possible consequences of relying too much on Artificial Intelligence?

2. Does this make you want to learn/study more about Artificial Intelligence for future jobs?

3. Do you have any further questions?



Chauhan, H. (2017, October 23). Why Artificial Intelligence Could Be NVIDIA's Golden Goose. 

         Retrieved October 24, 2017, from https://www.fool.com


Crist, R. (2017, October 23). Amazon's new research center seeks to improve AI vision. Retrieved                  
            October 24, 2017, from https://www.cnet.com
Metz, C. (2017, October 22). Tech Giants Are Paying Huge Salaries for Scarce A.I. Talent. Retrieved October 24, 2017, from https://www.nytimes.com

1 comment:

  1. Hi Jeff, your post is very interesting. I agree with you and that artificial intelligence is going to become more prominent in the future. I think as people, we are always fascinated by technology and we try to push it to the limit. That's why were constantly experimenting with different things. I think the push for more technology is good and bad. The positive is that technology will make our lives easier. The bad thing is that if we rely more on technology, soon they might become smarter than us, and that will be a problem.

    There are many movies talking about how technology will eventually rule this world and personally, I believe that can very well happen. Recently, Facebook's A.I started creating its own language and talking to each other. Facebook had to shut the program down.

    I think artificial intelligence is very interesting but I do not know much about that subject. Like you said, people with A.I. knowledge is very rare and they are very wealthy. I want to learn more about A.I. because I know that A.I. is going to change the world in the future.

    ReplyDelete