It's a seductive distraction from the advances in AI that are most likely to improve or even save your life On April 28, 2022, at a highly anticipated concert in Spokane, Washington, the musician Paul McCartney astonished his audience with a groundbreaking application of AI: He began to perform with a lifelike depiction of his long-deceased musical partner, John Lennon. Using recent advances in audio and video processing, engineers had taken the pair's final performance (London, 1969), separated Lennon's voice and image from the original mix and restored them with lifelike clarity. For years, researchers like me had taught machines to "see" and "hear" in order to make such a moment possible. As McCartney and Lennon appeared to reunite across time and space, the arena fell silent; many in the crowd began to cry. As an AI scientist and lifelong Beatles fan, I felt profound gratitude that we could experience this truly life-changing moment. Later that year, the world was captivated by another major breakthrough: AI conversation.

Regardless of whether it's language, music, speech, or video, sequential data isn't simple for AI and machine learning models to understand, especially when it relies upon the extensive surrounding context. For example, if an individual or an item vanishes from view in a video just to return a lot later, numerous algorithms will overlook what it looked like. Researchers at Google set out to solve this with Transformer, a design that reached out to thousands of words, drastically improving performance in tasks like song composition, image synthesis, sentence-by-sentence text translation, and document summarization. In any case, Transformer isn't flawless by any stretch, extending it to bigger contexts makes clear its restrictions. Applications that utilize enormous windows have memory necessities going from gigabytes to terabytes in size, which means models can just ingest a few paragraphs of text or create short bits of music.

"Artificial Intelligence" is currently the hottest buzzword in tech. And with good reason - after decades of research and development, the last few years have seen a number of techniques that have previously been the preserve of science fiction slowly transform into science fact. Already AI techniques are a deep part of our lives: AI determines our search results, translates our voices into meaningful instructions for computers and can even help sort our cucumbers (more on that later). In the next few years we'll be using AI to drive our cars, answer our customer service enquiries and, well, countless other things. But how did we get here?

"Artificial Intelligence" is currently the hottest buzzword in tech. And with good reason - after decades of research and development, the last few years have seen a number of techniques that have previously been the preserve of science fiction slowly transform into science fact. Already AI techniques are a deep part of our lives: AI determines our search results, translates our voices into meaningful instructions for computers and can even help sort our cucumbers (more on that later). In the next few years we'll be using AI to drive our cars, answer our customer service enquiries and, well, countless other things. But how did we get here?