Category: 1. AI Foundations

There’s nothing new that AI is a buzzword today. The term has seen various stomach-churning boom-bust cycles. Maybe it will once again go out of favor? Perhaps. But this time around, there are true innovations with AI that are transforming businesses. Mega tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook consider the category to be a major…

In this chapter, we’ve covered many concepts. Now it can be tough to understand the organization of AI. For instance, it is common to see terms like machine learning and deep learning get confused. But it is essential to understand the distinctions, which we will cover in detail in the rest of this book. But on a high-level view…

Besides advances in new conceptual approaches, theories, and models, AI had some other important drivers. Here’s a look at the main ones: All these factors reinforced themselves—adding fuel to the growth of AI. What’s more, these factors are likely to remain vibrant for many years to come.

As a teen in the 1950s, Geoffrey Hinton wanted to be a professor and to study AI. He came from a family of noted academics (his great-great-grandfather was George Boole). His mom would often say, “Be an academic or be a failure.”10 Even during the first AI winter, Hinton was passionate about AI and was convinced that Rosenblatt’s neural…

Even during the AI winter , there continued to be major innovations. One was backpropagation, which is essential for assigning weights for neural networks. Then there was the development of the recurrent neural network (RNN). This allows for connections to move through the input and output layers. But in the 1980s and 1990s, there also was the…

During the early 1970s, the enthusiasm for AI started to wane. It would become known as the “AI winter,” which would last through 1980 or so (the term came from “nuclear winter,” an extinction event where the sun is blocked and temperatures plunge across the world). Even though there were many strides made with AI, they still…

From 1956 to 1974, the AI field was one of the hottest spots in the tech world. A major catalyst was the rapid development in computer technologies. They went from being massive systems—based on vacuum tubes—to smaller systems run on integrated circuits that were much quicker and had more storage capacity. The federal government was…

John McCarthy’s interest in computers was spurred in 1948, when he attended a seminar, called “Cerebral Mechanisms in Behavior,” which covered the topic of how machines would eventually be able to think. Some of the participants included the leading pioneers in the field such as John von Neumann, Alan Turing, and Claude Shannon. McCarthy continued to immerse…

While Norbert Wiener created various theories, his most famous one was about cybernetics. It was focused on understanding control and communications with animals, people, and machines—showing the importance of feedback loops. In 1948, Wiener published Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Even though it was a scholarly work—filled with complex equations—the…