AI goes mainstream in Silicon Valley

Companies making progress in new technology

SAN FRANCISCO: Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become the buzzword of 2017 as tech companies, from promising start-ups to big-name firms such as Google and Facebook,are snapping up AI technology which has changed people’s lives and the world.

AI technology, which has experienced a rapid development in the past decade, has outperformed human intelligence in some areas and grown into a “super human artificial intelligence”.

The stunning power of Artificial Intelligence shocked the whole world last year when Google’s AlphaGo beat South Korea’ top player,an 18-time world champion Lee Sedol in the game of Go,based on a huge database and powerful algorithms.

But its latest version, Alpha Go Zero,which learned to teach itself how to play Go with no human background, demonstrated an even more powerful talent by defeating 3-0 the world top-ranking player, China’s Ke Jie, and a five world-champion team in another challenge game of Go in May 2017.

Similarly, the AI Lib rat us, invented by Carnegie Mellon, skin ned the world’s top poker players in a poker match in early 2017 by learning through self-play instead of human game data.

“The idea of Alpha Go is ... actually to discover what it means to do science – for a program to be able to learn from itself what knowledge is,” said Professor David Silver of the DeepMind team that created the Alpha Go Zero.

The overwhelming performance of the artificial intelligence programs proved that the best AI is better than the best humans, indicating the stronghold of human intelligence is being taken down by artificial intelligence.

Silicon Valley, home to many of the world’s largest high-tech companies and thousands of start-ups,has always been the frontrunner of tech innovations, including AI technology.

Silicon Valley-based tech firms are investing heavily on AI technology that would redefine the future of every industry. — Xinhua