Charting AI’s progress
In the past, the world of games provided the more spectacular examples about the power of AI’s strength in handling situations that required advanced strategy. A particular feat that set the stage for today’s advances involved the ancient and highly complex Chinese game of Go. Complex is not an overstatement, since the number of possible moves exceeds the number of atoms in the known universe. But in 2016, an AI computer program called AlphaGo, designed by Google’s AI group Deep Mind, beat the world’s No. 2 Go player in a five-game match. The program drew on hundreds of thousands of online Go games played between humans as data for a machine learning algorithm. Then, AlphaGo played the game against slightly different versions of itself over and over, fine-tuning its strategies iteratively using a technique called reinforcement learning. Now the benefits of artificial intelligence have moved well beyond playing games to finding practical applications for the world of business.- Energy: Google’s parent company Alphabet uses DeepMind AI to control power consumption in its data centers.
- Healthcare: An algorithm based on AlphaGo Zero is tackling the issue of protein folding – a significant problem for drug discovery. The knowledge gained will help medical researchers to build drugs that better combat various viruses. This will have far-reaching implications for improving healthcare.
- Business optimization: Domo is a fast-growing business management software company that’s raised over $500 million in funding. In 2017 launched Mr. Roboto, a dashboard with 500+ data connectors, capturing data directly from any third party source – cloud, on-prem, and proprietary systems. Mr. Roboto predicts a return on investment for marketing in real-time, customer churn, and sales forecasts.
