Council Post: From Digital To Physical: The Ultimate Challenge For AI

In the summer of 2012, Google made a big media splash when it showed that its researchers "trained a network of 1,000 computers wired up like a brain to recognize cats." While AI, neural networks and its most recent rebranding, "deep learning," were already established fields with decades of research and countless real-world applications behind them, the world at large (and all its cats) took notice. Deep learning, a branch of AI that closely mimics how neurons wire and fire, was becoming more powerful: The massive amounts of digital data and compute power needed for training these systems were now available to companies like Google. Since 2012, applications of AI have expanded to both the consumer and enterprise realms. For instance, AI can be applied to make smart phone pictures more beautiful, delete spam messages, recognize faces, translate languages, make video games more appealing and optimize sales engagements, among many others.