What Is Artificial Intelligence ?

by Mike Loukides, Ben Lorica

From computer vision to game playing, artificial intelligence (AI) has made a lot of progress in the past few years. Companies such as Google and Facebook have already placed huge bets on this technology, and over the next decade, AI features will steadily creep into one product after another. In this O’Reilly report, you’ll examine the state of AI today and where we might be headed in coming years.
To explain today’s AI capabilities, authors Ben Lorica and Mike Loukides look at prominent examples such as Google’s AlphaGo, self-driving cars, and face recognition—AIs that consist of narrow solutions to specific problems. Can researchers develop general intelligence flexible enough for an AI to learn without supervision, or choose what it wants to learn?
This report takes a deeper look into:
- The meaning of "general intelligence" when applied to AIs
- Moving AIs from supervised learning to unsupervised learning
- Why AIs can easily solve problems that humans find challenging, but not problems that humans find easy
- The differences between autonomous AIs and assistive AIs that augment our intelligence
- Factors that have made AI a hot topic in recent years
- Today’s successful AI systems, such as machine learning and computer vision
- OpenAI and the push to make AI research open and visible to the public

25 pages, ebook

Published June 15, 2016

Reviews

[Oge · Rating 4 out of 5]

FREE e-book.
Provides a good high-level introduction and overview of AI and many links for further reading.

[Hernan Espinosa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a basic introduction to what Artificial Intelligence really mean. For my part I read this text as an invitation to research. The book clearly suggest that the current excitement around AI is derived from the possibilities of more and more people experimenting with it. Still, though many people (like myself), may be inclined to experiment, at a basic conceptual level the general abstractions that we all hear contribute little in the understanding of what it is we are supposed to be experimenting with is? I feel this book brought me closer to an answer to this question.
Take into account this is not a comprehensive book, or a large publication. If I am forced to define it I woulds say it is an introduction, a good one.

[Dr. Tathagat Varma · Rating 2 out of 5]

A good compilation of some contemporary issues in AI. Quick read.