Business executives keep
talking about it. Teachers are struggling with what to do
about it. And artists like Drake seem
angry about it.
Love it or hate it, everyone is paying attention to
artificial intelligence right now. Almost overnight, a new crop of AI tools has
found its way into products used by billions of people, changing the way we work, shop, create, and communicate with each other.
AI advocates tout the technology’s potential to
supercharge our productivity, creating a new era of better jobs, better
education, and better treatments for diseases. AI skeptics have raised concerns
about the technology’s potential to disrupt jobs, mislead people, and possibly
bring about the end of humanity as we know it. Confusingly, some execs in Silicon Valley seem to hold both sets
of views at once.
What’s clear, however,
is that AI is not going away, but it is changing very fast. Here’s
everything you need to know to keep up.
What is AI?
In the public consciousness, “artificial intelligence” may
conjure up images of murderous machines eager to overtake humans, and capable
of doing so. But in the tech industry, it’s a broad
term that refers to different tools that are trained to perform a wide range of
complex tasks that might previously have required some input from an actual
person.
If you use the internet, then you almost certainly use
services that rely on AI to sort data, filter content and make suggestions,
among other tasks.
It’s the technology
that allows Netflix to recommend movies and that helps remove spam, hate speech
and other inappropriate content from your social media feeds. It helps power
everything from autocorrect features and Google Translate to facial recognition
services, the last of which uses AI that, in Microsoft’s
words, “mimics a human capability to recognize human faces.”
AI can also be successful in developing techniques for
solving a wide range of real world problems, such as adjusting traffic signals
in real time to manage congestion issues or helping medical professionals
analyze images to make a diagnosis. AI is also central to developing
self-driving cars by processing tremendous amounts of visual data so the
vehicles can understand their surroundings.
So why is everyone talking about AI now?
The short answer: ChatGPT.
For years, AI has largely operated in the background of
services we use every day. That changed following the
November launch of ChatGPT, a viral chatbot that put the power of AI
front and center.
People have already used ChatGPT, a tool created by
OpenAI, to draft lawsuits, write song lyrics and create research paper
abstracts so good they’ve even fooled some scientists. The tool has even passed standardized exams. And ChatGPT has sparked an intense
competition among tech companies to develop and deploy similar tools.
Microsoft and Google
have each introduced features powered by generative AI, the
technology underpinning ChatGPT, into their most widely used productivity tools. Meta, Amazon, and Alibaba have said they’re
working on generative AI tools, too. And numerous other businesses also
want in on the action.
It’s rare to see a cutting-edge technology become so
ubiquitous almost overnight. Now businesses, educators, and lawmakers are all
racing to adapt.
No comments:
Post a Comment