The father of modern computing and World War II hero, Alan Turing, presented his seminal paper on artificial intelligence (AI) in 1950. The paper opens with these words: ‘I propose to consider the question: Can machines think?'
Turing’s contemplations would set the stage for a technological revolution that is now transforming society positively, but is also bringing forth unforeseen challenges. Writing about it, tech researcher Nirit Weiss-Blatt described 2023 as the Year Of AI Panic. Even though AI and machine learning have been around for a couple of decades, things began to change in June 2017.
THE NEW WORLD ORDER OF AI
The world saw a paradigm shift when a bunch of Google engineers published, ‘Attention Is All You Need’—an oddly titled paper, proposing a new form of machine learning architecture called ‘transformer’. This paper paved the way for the dominance of large language models. Generative AI took centre-stage replacing good old-fashioned symbolic AI.
This newfangled set of algorithms fundamentally changed AI training models. Earlier, the problem with AI was the knowledge—you needed to feed enough rule-based knowledge to a machine about a subject for it to make intelligent decisions. Today, all you need is an enormous amount of data sets and enough computational power—the lever and fulcrum of the new world order.
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