It seems the enterprise is taking a serious interest in how the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) can provide a return on investment (ROI), as the number of companies implementing these technologies has grown by 270 percent in the past four years. On Monday, Gartner said that AI adoption has tripled in the last year alone, with an estimated 37 percent of firms now implementing AI in some form. According to the research agency's 2019 CIO Survey, AI is being used in a variety of applications. See also: GE is piloting'humble AI' to introduce business risk to algorithms AI in this context does not relate to the development of'true,' self-aware artificial intelligence. Rather, it can be considered an umbrella term for a range of applications including image recognition, natural language processing, cognitive computing, automatic Big Data analysis, and machine learning (ML), among other technologies.

Google's artificial intelligence chief Jeff Dean speaks at an event Monday. Google says it wants to help people do positive things with artificial intelligence. The search giant on Monday announced a new challenge for nonprofits, universities and other organizations working on AI projects that will benefit society. The contest is called the AI Global Impact Challenge, and the company has pledged $25 million in grants. The challenge is part of a new Google initiative called "AI for Social Good."

"AlphaGo is really more interesting than either Deep Blue or Watson, because the algorithms it uses are potentially more general-purpose," said Nick Bostrom of Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute. Creating "general" or multi-purpose, rather than "narrow", task-specific intelligence, is the ultimate goal in AI -- something resembling human reasoning based on a variety of inputs, and self-learning from experience. "So, if the machine can do new things when needed, then it has'true' intelligence'," Bostrom's colleague Anders Sandberg told AFP. In the case of Go, Google developers realised a more "human-like" approach would win over brute computing power. AlphaGo uses two sets of "deep neural networks" containing millions of connections similar to neurons in the brain.