How AI is changing how we do business: the father of contemporary AI gives his views

2017-06-23 16:40 chinadaily.com.cn Editor: Feng Shuang
Human vs AlphaGo. By Cai Meneg. China Daily

Human vs AlphaGo. By Cai Meneg. China Daily

Started in the 1950's, Artificial Intelligence, or AI, has experienced several ups and downs until 2016, when AlphaGo (built by DeepMind, a Google company) defeated the world champion of Go and AI becomes popular in the general public again. The drives for AI's currently popularity are three important breakthroughs: supercomputer, big data, and machine learning algorithm.

How is and will AI be influencing the business world? The authors have interviewed Professor Jürgen Schmidhuber, the father of contemporary AI. Professor Jürgen Schmidhuber's lab created Long short-Term Memory (LSTM) deep learning algorithm in the 1990's, which greatly advanced the development of deep learning and AI. One of Professor Jürgen Schmidhuber's students co-founded DeepMind, one of them was the first employee of DeepMind, and one of them is the first author of DeepMind's recent paper in Nature. In 2014, Professor Jürgen Schmidhuber co-founded NNAISENSE (a company of Artificial General Intelligence similar to DeepMind). Artificial General Intelligence, also called Strong AI, is the final destination of AI development. Comparing to Weak AI, who only solves one specific aspect of problems, Strong AI refers to AIs that can solve problems in different area and that can think, decide and reflect like human being.

The application of deep learning algorithm

Professor Jürgen Schmidhuber says he is pleased to see that there are billions of users covered by the applications based on LSTM algorithm. The largest listed companies, Apple, Google, Microsoft and Amazon, are widely using LSTM algorithm to provide services. Since 2015, for example, LSTM algorithm has reduced 49% of errors in speech recognition and accelerated the functionality of Google speech recognition, which is being used in more than two billions of Android mobile phones around the world. In addition, LSTM algorithm has also increase the adequacy of Google Translate. IPhone, Alexa of Amazon, Baidu and Microsoft are all using LSTM algorithm now. Moreover, deep learning has broad applications in other systems, such as recognition of video and handwriting; control of robots; analysis of image; summary of documentation; running chatting robots and smart personal assistants; and prediction of diseases, user click rates, stock market and component failure in large factories. AI will also derive innumerable applications in healthcare, industry, finance and legal professions.

What industries will be restructured by AI

Professor Jürgen Schmidhuber says that, in the long run, AI will restructure all of the industries and sectors. So far, AI has been used in different fields of healthcare, finance, traditional sectors. Among them, advertising is perhaps the most obvious industry that already has been massively affected by pattern recognition on user data through Google, Baidu, Amazon, Alibaba, Facebook and Tencent.

More...

Related news

Share : 0