Getting Down to Business With AI

Artificial intelligence is a very broad term that dates back to 1956 and describes efforts to get computers to do things that could previously only be done by humans. It occurs frequently in science fiction, yet today's excitement is focused on one particular subfield of AI known as "machine learning," which involves teaching machines to do things by example – as opposed to, say, "expert systems," which rely on rules and knowledge distilled from human experts. The excitement, in fact, is mostly centered on a specific machine learning technique known as "deep learning," in which software simulations of simple models of the human brain are trained to do things by showing them large numbers of examples. "Neural networks," as these simulations are called, have been around for a while, but "deep" networks, which are more sophisticated and can be trained to recognize more subtle differences, have become far more capable in recent years. In other words, deep learning is just one very specific example of a subfield of AI, but the excitement around this particular subfield stems from its ability to handle a very wide range of problems, from image recognition to language translation to transcribing speech.