What is Artificial Intelligence?

While AI is generally synonymous with artificial intelligence, more technically sophisticated systems can be described as “artificial general intelligence”. These systems are able to solve problems that are very different from those that can be solved with a machine, in an extremely fast and scalable fashion.
Since computer hardware has continued to improve to become incredibly efficient and powerful, many companies have sought to improve on machine learning capabilities — in the form of neural networks. Neural networks are simply algorithms that train one another by combining their experience to perform many different tasks.
Neural networks can now be used to perform tasks that were once performed exclusively by a human brain, such as automatically recognizing faces and speech in images, as well as making decisions based on a set of data such as a person’s previous experiences, or the number of likes they have on a social network. As such, the possibilities for using neural networks to process massive amounts of data in order to reach the answer are limitless.

A lot of people are expecting major breakthroughs in AI by 2020 or later. However, that will likely be some years away from the day when we are fully autonomous and can live in the future. In the meantime, a number of researchers are exploring various approaches that will eventually help us keep up with AI. Examples include autonomous vehicles, deep neural networks, and reinforcement learning. In general, most researchers believe that the more sophisticated machine learning techniques, including those used in these areas, will take a while longer to evolve. But even in this era of rapid AI progress, researchers are finding unexpected ways to improve things by the minute.