A breakthrough is a moment of major advancement. When it comes to artificial intelligence (AI), breakthroughs are happening all the time. From self-driving cars to coding education, AI is making waves across industries and empowering people to do more. But what’s behind the rapid rise of this technology?
The earliest forms of AI began with ancient myths and legends, and philosophers like Aristotle and Descartes pondered the possibility of machines thinking like humans. Then, in the 1940s, scientists developed the first computers, which could perform complex calculations. But they weren’t intelligent enough to think in the same way as a human being.
In 1956, mathematician Alan Turing proposed the test of intelligent machinery by having a human evaluator conduct text-based conversations with a machine designed to generate human-like responses. If the evaluator could not reliably tell the difference between the two, the machine would be considered intelligent. The ELIZA chatbot was the first functioning example of this kind of generative AI.
AI can help companies automate routine tasks like data collection, entering and preprocessing. This allows employees to focus on higher value, more creative work. It can also be used to predict customer needs and behaviors, so that businesses can deliver more personalized content and offers.
Generative AI is a key innovation in AI, as it allows computers to create new content on their own. This can be a sentence in natural language, an image or even commands to software code. Variational autoencoders or VAEs, diffusion models and flow-based models are some of the most popular generative AI techniques. These ML algorithms can produce extended sequences of content that are difficult to distinguish from the original data. They’re the basis of most of today’s headline-making generative AI tools, including ChatGPT, GPT-4 and Copilot.