1 minute read
The Rise
from Naturally Stupid
by LASA Ezine
The roots of AI began in the 1950s, but it took many key developments scattered throughout the last half-century to make it a cuttingedge, all-pervasive technology.
AI has been around for a long while, but it took many things coming together to make it happen: An explosion in the availability and sources of data, massively increased computing power, and a usable interface to make it accessible to the general public
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There’s much debate about when AI started; however, many people would argue that Alan Turing’s “Turing Test” began a crusade to see if humans could build a machine that would respond like a real person. Many early “machines” were built to play games like chess or checkers and see how they compared to human players. One of the earliest examples was SNARC, an AI comprised of 40 “neurons” that could solve a maze automatically.
The AI experts unanimously agreed that the development of AI happened in steps. Sallam mentioned a major milestone that happened in the 1960s. “Silicon chips were the first stepping stone to enable the ability to compute in an automated way,” she said. Not long after, Wabot-1 was developed by Japanese researchers in 1967. It could communicate in Japanese and measure distances and was considered the first anthropomorphic robot.
Another significant milestone came in 1982 with the Hopfield Neta recurrent neural network that made machine learning much faster. Both Sicular and Saxena pointed out the need for data to train these models, and the advent of the internet led to such an explosion of data.
By the mid-2000s, many industries are exploring building models with data. For example, in Financial Services, high-frequency trading (a.k.a. algorithmic trading) takes off and neural networks are first used in fraud detection.
Another pivotal moment is the development of ImageNet, a database of images, and the ImageNet challenge, a university competition where people try to classify images with the lowest error rate. In 2012, Sicular noted, “Alex Krizhevsky won the competition with
