The last decade was significant for the technology players’ inventions, and regulations have sneaked in, changing the course dramatically. AI was one such technology, surrounded by all different types of hype, and innovators talking about machine intelligence surpassing human intelligence, organizations expected more and got less when they analyzed the ability. Many AI experts working with various organizations then gave name to AI peaks as summer, and troughs as AI winter.
Last decade was something of a journey for AI where it was peaking with new announcements, though most of it was overhyped. Yoshua Bengio, the AI pioneer, also known as the godfather of AI, told BBC that the AI capabilities were somewhat overhyped in the last decade and undertaken by certain organizations to gain benefits. Every organization is looking to gain from AI, but hype and innovations we are portraying are still far away from reality today.
Next decade we might see a slowing pace of AI hype; real-world applications will be appreciated. Katja Hofmann, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, said in a statement that AI is transitioning to a new phase. Currently, many organizations have invested millions of dollars in AI development, and there will be many more organizations investing in making a breakthrough in the sector. Some researchers currently believe that it’s wrong to call that the next decade AI will go in the winter phase.
At the start of 2010, one of the world leaders of AI, DeepMind, often referred to something called as AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) that would be developed at some point in the future. It was termed that AGI would be one of the brainchilds behind the autonomous machines. DeepMind was then acquired by Google to bring better technology in the new space, “Solve Intelligence, and then use that to solve everything else.” Several innovators thought about making AGI a reality over the next decade—Elon Musk’s $1 billion focusing on AI lab, OpenAI, and even academics like MIT professor Max Tegmark.
The focus on AGI reduced during the decade, and businesses moved to other projects. Even in 2019, at the end of the decade, the most powerful computers in the world were just machines that were good only for specific tasks rather than surpassing the human intelligence level. The impact of the idea that super intelligence will be in control shaped the 2014 book by Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University who predicted a world where machines will be firmly in control.
Gary Marcus, an AI researcher at New York University, said in a statement that by the end of the decade, there was a growing realization that current techniques could only carry us so far. AI is a long-term scientific journey, and will not end with certain inventions. Organizations investing in AI need to believe that it will be the most powerful enabling technology ever created, and the invention could unlock solutions to thousands of problems. In the next decade, organizations will be generalizing their capabilities in AI systems to assist them in achieving the required potential.
Conclusion
The challenge for innovators is working toward building AI solutions matching human capabilities. Whether the next decade will be able to do that, we need to wait and watch. In the decade, hope to see solutions that are realistic in terms of AI capabilities rather than just hype. A machine that can function autonomously, showing more of human capabilities rather than specific tasks should be the next vision. To know more about technology, download the latest whitepapers on AI.
