Define: artificial intelligence

Alas, that term "artificial intelligence" gets bandied about a lot in business and non-business circles. So what exactly do we mean by "AI"? And to make things more complicated - what do people mean when they say "machine learning"? 

A no-nonsense guide to AI

Quite simply: AI is a general label for all of the computerised systems that perform tasks in an approximation of human intelligence.

You know that magic rice cooker? It might have a heuristic (fancy way of saying "a rule of thumb") on "how long to keep the water on the boil". It's not quite as sexy as "machine learning", but this approximation of how grandma used to cook the rice is as simple as saying, "use two cups of water for every one cup of rice". 

The next level down is "machine learning", and I actually prefer to split this down into supervised learning, unsupervised learning and reinforcement learning. These are statistical methods where a computer-defined model is created that, in the round, is able to predict an expected output, given a set of inputs. 

Typically it's the "supervised learning" that we talk about at this level. This is where we have a labelled set of data: for example we're teaching our kids how to sort the laundry. We say - all the clothes that looks like it has two holes to put your legs through - those are shorts. And the ones that have three holes, one for the head - those are t-shirts. Those are 2 labels we've given our kid, and they go and classify the laundry as either shorts or t-shirts. Having a machine learning platform perform this categorisation might be labour-saving in the long-run.

So what's an example of deep learning? You know that new-fangled noise cancellation plugin ? That's running on specialised hardware in your computer, and NVIDIA (disclaimer: I may be long NVDA when you read this) have built and trained a deep learning model that can discriminate between the user's voice and background noise. This starts to get in the territory of unsupervised and reinforcement learning.

The autonomous self-driving car is a great example: over time the system is able to better improve it's predictive capability as it is exposed to more "tick" of data.

What's the bottom line?

Well, if I were to give a little prediction it'd be this: that there is an untapped potential in business and industry to exploit the opportunities in artificial intelligence. And the upside of that will go to those who understand this intersection of technology and busines.