We're making this analogy that AI is the new electricity. Electricity transformed industries: agriculture, transportation, communication, manufacturing.
It is difficult to think of a major industry that AI will not transform. This includes healthcare, education, transportation, retail, communications, and agriculture. There are surprisingly clear paths for AI to make a big difference in all of these industries.
Education is not about thinning the herd. Education is about helping every student succeed.
Our education system has succeeded so far in teaching generations to do different routine tasks. So when tractors displaced farming labor, we taught the next generation to work in factories. But what we've never really been good at is teaching a huge number of people to do non-routine creative work.
A single neuron in the brain is an incredibly complex machine that even today we don't understand. A single 'neuron' in a neural network is an incredibly simple mathematical function that captures a minuscule fraction of the complexity of a biological neuron.
If we can make computers more intelligent - and I want to be careful of AI hype - and understand the world and the environment better, it can make life so much better for many of us. Just as the Industrial Revolution freed up a lot of humanity from physical drudgery I think AI has the potential to free up humanity from a lot of the mental drudgery.
As leaders, it is incumbent on all of us to make sure we are building a world in which every individual has an opportunity to thrive. Understanding what AI can do and how it fits into your strategy is the beginning, not the end, of that process.
Want to train a machine translation system? Train it on a gazillion pairs of sentences of parallel corpora, and that creates a lot of breakthrough results. Increasingly, I'm seeing results on small data where you want to try to take in results even if you have 1,000 images.
If a typical person can do a mental task with less than one second of thought, we can probably automate it using AI either now or in the near future.
Elon Musk is worried about AI apocalypse, but I am worried about people losing their jobs. The society will have to adapt to a situation where people learn throughout their lives depending on the skills needed in the marketplace.
We can build a much brighter future where humans are relieved of menial work using AI capabilities.
Deep-learning will transform every single industry. Healthcare and transportation will be transformed by deep-learning. I want to live in an AI-powered society. When anyone goes to see a doctor, I want AI to help that doctor provide higher quality and lower cost medical service. I want every five-year-old to have a personalised tutor.
In my own life, I found that whenever I wasn't sure what to do next, I would go and learn a lot, read a lot, talk to experts. I don't know how the human brain works, but it's almost magical: when you read enough or talk to enough experts, when you have enough inputs, new ideas start appearing. This seems to happen for a lot of people that I know.
In healthcare, we are beginning to see that AI can read the radiology images better than most radiologists. In education, we have a lot of data, and companies like Coursera are putting up a lot of content online.
Despite all the hype and excitement about AI, it's still extremely limited today relative to what human intelligence is.
I think the first wave of deep learning progress was mainly big companies with a ton of data training very large neural networks, right? So if you want to build a speech recognition system, train it on 100,000 hours of data.
I think that, hundreds of years from now, if people invent a technology that we haven't heard of yet, maybe a computer could turn evil. But the future is so uncertain. I don't know what's going to happen five years from now. The reason I say that I don't worry about AI turning evil is the same reason I don't worry about overpopulation on Mars.
A lot of the progress in machine learning - and this is an unpopular opinion in academia - is driven by an increase in both computing power and data. An analogy is to building a space rocket: You need a huge rocket engine, and you need a lot of fuel.
Every company has messy data, and even the best of AI companies are not fully satisfied with their data. If you have data, it is probably a good idea to get an AI team to have a look at it and give feedback. This can develop into a positive feedback loop for both the IT and AI teams in any company.
People change jobs much more often, and therefore, companies, on average, invest less in employee development.
