Artificial Intelligence for Beginners
This article will explore the basics of what is artificial intelligence, and its use cases.
What is Artificial Intelligence?
As opposed to human intelligence, artificial intelligence is the ability for a computer or a robot to complete tasks typically done by humans.
What is AI (Artificial Intelligence) used for?
The purpose of AI is to simplify tasks, or to at least make them more efficient. Smart chatbots, for example, have been implemented by financial institutions and airlines to provide you with instant responses to prompts like, “I need to reschedule my flight.”
You also have generative AI that is used to produce new content including audio, text and images. Examples of softwares that use generative AI include Microsoft Outlook, Chat GPT and DALL-E.
How does it work?
Because a computer can run by itself, it can perform frequent and high-volume tasks, which allows it to learn quickly.
Broken down, here are the steps to creating an AI system:
Define the goal for the AI system.
Gather and clean the data, of which the model will be fed on - this step is critical to building a robust AI algorithm.
Create the algorithm. Think these as writing out mathematical instructions. What should the computer do? What are the steps it should take?
Train the algorithm. This is where you make sure that outcomes of the AI algorithm meet the expectations. When training the model, it is important to not “overfit” the model, or it will become biased. For example, a self-driving car that has only been trained with perfect weather will fail in the real world, because it is not ready to face different driving conditions.
Deploy the final product. And monitor!
Use cases of Artificial Intelligence
Amazon
Amazon has been using AI to improve its user-experience by suggesting customers with products they would like. AI is also used at the company to detect defective products before they get shipped. Large companies like Amazon leverage on AI to save costs, that they would otherwise spend on human resources.
Just like Amazon, Facebook uses AI for recommendation algorithms. When you go on Facebook or Instagram, the platform suggests you accounts to follow or people to befriend.
Gmail
Other than filling in gaps or reminding you to attach a file, Gmail also helps you filter out spam mails. After having recruited its in-house machine learning framework, TensorFlow, it has been blocking an extra 100+ million spam messages every day.
Other use cases:
Siri
Grammarly
Google Maps
Facial recognition
I hope this provided a easy-to-understand overview of what is Artificial Intelligence. If you want to learn more, here are some great resources: