Popular culture on Artificial Intelligence and the reality of how it is now beginning to be employed are often quite different, according to this article from CloudTech, “the future of AI isn’t about one giant super-intelligence. Instead, it’s about many small, dedicated agents that know you intimately and work on your behalf to improve your everyday life. That could be helping you shop, get to work or, even, find a partner. Each is focused on a discrete task, and each gets better over time and adapts to your needs as they evolve.”
It continues with a discussing of AI on the Cloud, “cloud computing solved the two biggest hurdles for AI: abundant, low cost computing and a way to leverage massive volumes of data. However, a number of challenges remain. Chief among those challenges is the one affecting the whole industry: skills. While open source libraries make it easy to get started, for genuinely powerful AI you need actual data scientists. People with strong programming backgrounds, a deep understanding of mathematics and statistics, as well as business domain knowledge. Needless to say, those people are rare.”
Such challenges also have many lessons to be learned, “despite the challenges, the main lesson is this: small, focused, cloud-based algorithms are going to be the AI that changes our lives over the next decade. It’s better to solve one problem really well, than it is to solve 100 problems poorly. Today’s markets reward companies that maintain their focus.”