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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.

They said it couldn't be done, but Google's AI technology has proved them wrong by mastering the ancient Chinese game of Go roughly a decade earlier than anyone expected. Tapping neural networks and advanced "tree search" programs, researchers from Google DeepMind created a system called AlphaGo that takes a different approach to the game than had been tried before. In Go, the player's objective is to surround the opponent's pieces by alternately placing black and white pieces on a 19-by-19-line grid while simultaneously avoiding having one's own pieces surrounded. With more possible positions than there are atoms in the universe, Go has long been considered an ultimate challenge for artificial intelligence researchers. Traditional AI efforts to master Go have focused on using search trees, a computer science technique used for locating specific values from within a set. AlphaGo, on the other hand, uses the more advanced Monte Carlo tree search approach often used in game playing.

Have you heard the one about how our jobs are about to be snatched away by machines? Or how artificial intelligence will ultimately rise up against us? AI is a field full of tropes, many of which come from places of truth: AI is evolving at an incredible speed, and humans are teaching some AI to learn using the same basic model found in our own craniums. But for a more realistic take on the future of AI, look no further than the many software engineers and companies that have struggled to create an intelligent system that can identify cyber attacks. "We were trying to figure out what is the foundational problem--why do we have so many cyber attacks and data breaches that are going undetected?" says Kalyan Veeramachaneni, a research scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab and the author of a paper released today titled "Training A Big Data Machine To Defend."