Artificial Intelligence – The Model T

If you think that the current Artificial Intelligence (AI) hype and product releases are just a bit underwhelming and produce dubious, impersonal results then remember that many of these AI models are less than a year old and like the Model T Ford, are just a taste of things to come.

The analogy of the car industry is a valid one, there has been an explosion of new products, every tech company has an AI product or add on to their existing product range or the company is built around their new AI feature. Over time, many of these smaller companies will be absorbed into others as the products mature and they actually start to do something of real, lasting value and the companies become profitable.

AI is not New

Artificial Intelligence is not new, it’s been around since the 1950’s when British Mathematician Alan Turing published a paper on how to build intelligent machines and test their ability. In that same decade, Newell, Shaw and Simon presented a program called the Logic Theorist, designed to mimic the problem-solving capability of a human, funded by the RAND corporation. In the mid 60’s a program called Eliza from Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT was an early chatbot that simulated a psychotherapist and one of the first programs capable of attempting the Turing Test (to exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from a human).

From that point onwards the quest to build software and machines that could “think” escalated. Advances in technology made computers cheaper, more accessible and the power increased according to Moore’s Law. Software like Dragon Dictate (speech to text transcription) and many attempts at language translation emerged.

In 1997, the IBM Deep Blue computer defeated the word champion chess player Gary Kasparov.

2020 The Revolution Commences

Fast forward to the 20’s and Open AI started the current revolution with the release of Chat GPT. With a $1 billion investment by Microsoft in 2019, Open AI took the world by storm, going viral in late 2022 with their Generative AI product Chat GPT.

AI Models

If we define AI as an “educated guess” then the more education we can provide (the larger model), the better the results. Many models are now trained on billions of examples. It really is learning by mistakes, taking history into account and weighing up the positives and negatives to come up with a “reasoned” response.

Just like the automobile analogy however, a larger model is not always better, the quality of the model and how it’s implemented is also important. Not every Ford model was successful but the F100 and Mustang models were quality products that fit the customer requirements.

Source: https://ospreydata.com/ai-ml-models-101-what-is-a-model/

These models need constant feeding and improvement to remain relevant. One of the key areas of current concern is bias. Do the models favour one culture/race/gender over another – an unconscious bias? This is of particular concern if we use AI to pre-screen job applicants.

Generative AI

A Generative AI product is one that “generates” content, whether that be text, pictures, sound, video or a combination of all of them. Chat GPT is currently a text only generation tool. Other tools can generate music, videos, sound and complex documents. Generating posts for marketing and social media is a very hot topic right now.

Some short videos have been released this year that are 100% AI generated and look and sound like the real thing. Will this be the end of high paid Hollywood (or Bollywood) actors if a movie can be entirely AI generated in the future?

What about Deepfakes – videos designed to deceive the viewer and compromise the “actors”? Or Music that is 100% AI Generated?

The US Copyright office has already ruled that content that is AI Generated cannot be copyrighted as it does not have that human touch. What will this ruling do to the commercial side of creative works generated by AI?

AI Powered Search

Microsoft released their AI powered version of Bing search in February 2023, utilizing their investment in Open AI.

In May 2023, Google finally revealed their hand with a suite of AI powered products and enhancements to existing products including Google search.

AI Applications

In 2022 and 2023 almost every software vendor released an AI product or added AI capabilities to improve existing products.

Salesforce also got onboard the bandwagon with upgrades to Einstein, Slack and Tableau, all enhanced by AI.

Other applications of AI include:

• AI Powered chatbots
• Personalized shopping recommendations
• Credit Card fraud prevention
• Identifying fake website reviews
• Diagnosing medical images
• Detecting diseases and identifying cancer cells
• Personalized learning journeys
• Autonomous (self-driving) vehicles
• Video analytics (identifying threats from multiple video sources)
• Facial recognition and number plate recognition
• Image to text, text to Image and image searching
• Improving navigation based on weather and traffic patterns
• Improving farm productivity with soil and weed analysis

Google

Google announced the pubic availability of Google Bard in May 2023 with availability in 180 countries (excludes the European Union countries and Canada for now). There’s no waitlist or cost involved if you are in one of those supported countries and the tool supports over 100 languages. Comparisons to ChatGPT are very positive and its ability to access the Internet (ChatGPT can’t), means it can access up to date information and do useful things for us.

Bard includes new features via plugins that enable access to Restaurant Reservations (Opentable), Trip Bookings (Kayak), Playlists (Spotify), Online Orders (Walmart) and job Hunting (Indeed).

Bard also enhances existing Google Apps like helping you to write emails with just a short prompt, a magic editor for photos to adjust lighting and remove unwanted objects. The MusicLM (Language model) can generate songs based on what you ask it – this is said to be “mind blowing”.

What’s Next?

Open AI, Google and Microsoft are making the headlines right now but stay tuned for product releases from Apple and Meta/Facebook later this year.

Unlike the Model T Ford claimed, today’s AI is not built for everyone or every situation. it’s a bit underpowered at times, it’s not perfect and is suited to some applications better than others. Having said that, feel free to kick the tires and give it a test drive, knowing full well that the next model will be even better!

At KeyNode Solutions, a leading San Diego Salesforce Partner, we want to keep our visitors and clients up to date with the latest information. Stay tuned to our next blog post where we will talk about how Salesforce will be using AI to help propel the world’s largest CRM to even greater heights! If you have any questions in the meantime, contact us at hello@keynodesolutions.com or call us at 1-858-215-5371

Note: None of this article was AI generated