This is the first of a multi-part series explaining the fundamentals of deep learning by long-time tech journalist Michael Copeland.
Artificial intelligence is the future. Artificial intelligence is science fiction. Artificial intelligence is already part of our everyday lives. All those statements are true, it just depends on what flavor of AI you are referring to.
For example, when Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo program defeated South Korean Master Lee Se-dol in the board game Go earlier this year, the terms AI, machine learning, and deep learning were used in the media to describe how DeepMind won. And all three are part of the reason why AlphaGo trounced Lee Se-Dol. But they are not the same things.
The easiest way to think of their relationship is to visualize them as concentric circles with AI — the idea that came first — the largest, then machine learning — which blossomed later, and finally deep learning — which is driving today’s AI explosion — fitting inside both.
From Bust to Boom
AI has been part of our imaginations and simmering in research labs since a handful of computer scientists rallied around the term at the Dartmouth Conferences in 1956 and birthed the field of AI. In the decades since, AI has alternately been heralded as the key to our civilization’s brightest future, and tossed on technology’s trash heap as a harebrained notion of over-reaching propellerheads. Frankly, until 2012, it was a bit of both.
Over the past few years AI has exploded, and especially since 2015. Much of that has to do with the wide availability of GPUs that make parallel processing ever faster, cheaper, and more powerful. It also has to do with the simultaneous one-two punch of practically infinite storage and a flood of data of every stripe (that whole Big Data movement) – images, text, transactions, mapping data, you name it.
Let’s walk through how computer scientists have moved from something of a bust — until 2012 — to a boom that has unleashed applications used by hundreds of millions of people every day.
