AI Artificial intelligence is now 60+ years old as a field and younger as an industry. Since inception, the quest to develop true AI has been both intense and mild, high and low, hyped and played down. Without a question, the AI journey has been long, and we have come a long way from expert systems to deep learning systems.
AI is becoming an increasingly common aspect of our daily lives, as most of us are aware. There is so much AI can do today that couldn’t have been thought of as possible years before the establishment of AI as a field. Many of us would be quite surprised to learn of some of the abilities AI already possesses, today.
Want to know the things it can do today, in detail? Then keep reading.
- AI that debates with human
Can you imagine an AI that debates you on climate change or political stance? It is now a reality with the debut of Project Debater by IBM research. Project Debater relies on three pioneering capabilities. The first is data-driven speech writing and delivery, or the ability to automatically generate a whole speech, reminiscent of an opinion article, and deliver it persuasively. The second is listening comprehension, which is the ability to understand a long spontaneous speech made by the human opponent in order to construct a meaningful rebuttal. The third is the system’s ability to model human dilemmas and form principled arguments made by humans in different debates based on a unique knowledge graph. By combining these core capabilities, it can conduct a meaningful debate with human debaters.
- AI that generates photo-realistic characters
With ArtBreeder, you can now see how your favorite anime and manga characters would look like in real life. To do so, you simply have to upload an image of the character and let the website do the heavy lifting, or toggle features using its Edit-Genes tab. This is not all, you can also do the reverse and create a stylistic portrait of yourself. It is even possible to see the opposite gender of yourself if you are curious. With more features coming on ArtBreeder each day, the possibilities are endless.
- AI that uncover the secrets of the Big Bang
Because of the special mathematical properties of particle physics, it is not easy to use machine learning to study quark gluon plasma – the state of the universe after the Big Bang. However, a neural network has been developed that can be used for this purpose.
This intricate process of whirling particles and energy can hardly be more complicated. The state of matter known as quark-gluon plasma is produced today by high-energy atomic nucleus collisions, for example at CERN. However, using artificial intelligence or machine learning for this purpose seems like an obvious idea. Ordinary machine-learning algorithms, however, are not suitable for this task. The mathematical properties of particle physics require a very special structure of neural networks. At TU Wien (Vienna), it has now been shown how neural networks can be successfully used for these challenging tasks in particle physics.
- AI that creates your very own Metaverse avatar
The metaverse has been moving quickly, even since October 2021 when Facebook renamed itself Meta. An interesting idea is instead of us accessing the metaverse, we could delegate it to synthetic versions of ourselves created via machine learning. Trained on our needs and likes, our synthetic selves would navigate digital spaces with ease. Combine everything Amazon and Facebook know already about your purchase intent, add your dinner conversation, a quick morning meeting to set priorities – and your digital avatar could be a functioning replica. It would need no physical existence, but could synthesize your speech and your physical features and go forth into the meta world. It will negotiate your new job contract, pick some clothes out, book a restaurant – you name it. This is the metaverse where the work gets done: our avatars execute the boring jobs in the virtual world while we focus on what really matters in the real one. It could function like the invisible place below the stairs where the actual work gets done in Downton Abbey.
- AI that feels and show emotions
Remember Sophia, who made history by becoming the first human-like AI robot to be granted legal citizenship? There is now another humanoid AI following the debut of Sophia. The RIKEN Guardian Robot Project in Japan has created an android child named Nikola that successfully expresses six basic emotions. The new study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, tested how well people could identify six facial expressions — happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust — which were generated by moving “muscles” in Nikola’s face. This is the first time that the quality of android-expressed emotion has been tested and verified for these six emotions.
Yeap, and that’s just a few out of many! Frightening or exhilarating? That’s up to you to decide.😉
AI is still under deployment and has a bright future ahead of it. We wouldn’t be surprised to see AI doing things it cannot do today in the future.