AI, its evolution and applications

When we think about intelligence it is normal that we refer it to our own. We rarely stop to think about how we think and whether it is one thing or many. We take our wonderful ability to explore and understand the world for granted.

It was therefore a big surprise when at the beginning of the computing era in the 1950s (!), attempts were made to use computers to emulate human intelligence with no notable results.

In the 1980s, with the widespread availability of computers in the world, efforts to discover the secret of intelligence were resumed, but despite discovering some important principles, the computing power of that time frustrated progress. The only notable advance was being able to recognize the handwritten numbers on bank checks and little else.

However, some numerical models became practical and allowed us to make forecasts and detect some “simple” patterns; this practice is now known as “machine learning” and is still considered a form of “AI.”

It is not until the 21st century and the development of distributed computing (cloud computing) that we finally have the immense computing resources necessary to approximate human intelligence.

The first major advance had to do with vision and object recognition with a technique known as “deep learning.” Huge arrays of numbers encode objects and the situations in which they appear. This allows the computer to recognize people, animals, cars, etc. and is the technology found in your phone to tell you which person appears in a photo or allow some cars to drive “themselves”.

Human language however proved to be too “obscure” for these methods. The big obstacle is that language demands context and context is the entire world!

But finally, a couple of years ago with the ability to assimilate the entire Internet, LLMs (large language models) have managed to decipher and assimilate the human language. The best-known model is ChatGPT, which has surprised everyone with its ability to understand and execute tasks with common human language.

The era of artificial intelligence is just beginning, and the benefits promise to be enormous.

At Xaguar Soluciones we have the knowledge of both the technology and business processes to help your company take advantage of the AI era.

For more info: Is AI all the same?