AI Breakthroughs
Technology

6 Mind-Blowing AI Breakthroughs that Popularized the Technology

Artificial Intelligence (AI), compared to other technologies, seems to have a higher frequency of interesting developments in the past few years.

AI, to say in the simplest words possible, has moved from the domain of science fiction and into the real world.

AI Breakthroughs

You might already know a couple of AI innovations. Take Pokémon for example. It’s the game that dominated the smartphone game market and brought back childhood memories for probably hundreds of thousands of people.

But, did it ever occurred to you how did AI come into existence in the first place?

More importantly, what forced technology leaders, entrepreneurs, and even big companies to take notice of this brilliant technology?

In this article, I’m going to share some of the mind-blowing breakthroughs made using AI technology.

6 – Mind-Blowing AI Breakthroughs

AI is probably the hottest buzzword in the world of technology. While some of us are still trying to understand the difference between AI and Machine Learning, this breakthrough technology is currently dominating the world by storm.

Here are the top 6 AI breakthroughs that popularized the technology.

1 – Deep Blue Defeats World Champion in Chess | 1997

IBM was probably one of the early inventors of AI solutions.

In 1997, IBM built a chess supercomputer that beat the most famous and world champion chess player Garry Kasparov.

This was one of the first times in history that proved how powerful machines can be.

Though Deep Blue did not really use artificial intelligence, it used a combination of brute force processing that processed thousands of moves every second.

Now, whether it counts as an AI breakthroughs or not, one thing was clear at that time, which is that Deep Blue was a significant milestone in the history of technology.

2 – The Birth of Siri | 2010

Siri was probably the first to start the era of virtual assistants. But, did you know that Siri was not developed by Apple and it was first published as a mobile app?

That’s right. Siri was built by Nuance Communications and just after 2 months of its release, Apple bought it and integrated it deeply into the Apple Ecosystem.

Siri, as you already know, answers questions, run searches, makes recommendations, schedules events, and much more.

In fact, Siri was the first virtual assistant to replace touch screens and keywords. And it took Amazon about four years to build its own virtual assistant Alexa, while Google Assistant and Microsoft’s Cortana caught up later and with less effective results.

3 – Watson AI | 2011

In 2011, IBM introduced its first piece of AI technology called Watson AI, which was named after IBM’s first CEO Thomas J. Watson.

It was a computer system built for the sole purpose of answering questions given in natural language.  In fact, IBM built Watson AI to answer questions on a famous reality TV show called ‘Jeopardy’.

Long story short, Watson AI beat the two participants and won $1 Million prize money, which was the exact moment marked as the birth of AI that we know today.

Fast forward to 3 years later, Google noted the advancement of IBM’s Watson AI and acquired a startup called DeepMind to fuel their own expansion in the field of AI.

This was when only big companies had access to tools, knowledge, and resources to create AI solutions.

But as the years passed, the awareness and accessibility to AI technology increased.

4 – The ImageNet Challenge | 2015

In 2015, Google and Microsoft joined hands to participate in the ImageNet challenge.

To give you a little bit of context, ImageNet is a huge image database in which each node consists of a hierarchy of hundreds and thousands of pictures of over 1000 categories.

The ImageNet challenge was about building a computer system that would beat humans at identifying objects in pictures.

As you might have anticipated, Google and Microsoft won the ImageNet challenge by creating a deep learning system. In fact, the accuracy rate of the deep learning system increased from 71.8% to 97.3% over time.

5 – AlphaGo & AlphaGoZero | 2016

In 2016, another AI advancement were made when Google’s AlphaGo AI solution beat the best boardgame Go player, Lee Sedol.

For those who don’t know, Go is a much more complex game than Chess. And Google’s AlphaGo was still able to beat the best player in the world by reportedly using 280 GPUs and 1920 CPUs.

But, what’s even more surprising news is that in the same year, Google built an advanced version of AlphaGo and named it AlphaGoZero.

Unlike Deep Blue and AlphaGo, which learned the game by relying on previous data, AlphaGoZero learnt the game by playing thousands of matches against itself and beat the AlphaGo version in one go.

Simply put, the AlphaGoZero taught itself and learned the game inside out in a matter of just 3 days.

6 – Self-Driving Car Hits the Roads | 2018

2018 was marked with the most significant advancement in the AI field when Google announced its Self-driving car project with Waymo.

Waymo is an Uber-like taxi app service that partnered with Google to spin off the first commercial self-driving taxi service in Phoenix, Arizona.

Currently, Waymo One is used by over 400 members. Though there is always a human operator rides with the autonomous car to monitor its performance and take control whenever a situation arises.

But self-driving cars undoubtedly made headlines in the world of technology and Artificial Intelligence.

Conclusion

Thanks to all these companies which made all these AI breakthroughs possible, Artificial Intelligence technology has really evolved since its inception. Soon, AI is forecasted to slide even further behind the curtains of uncertainty and will introduce new innovations.

This begs the question – as the new AI technology advances further, how will your business leverage it to keep up with the market?

If you wish to ride the wave of AI’s growth, it’s highly recommended to rely on a prominent mobile app development services company, since they’ll have better knowledge and resources to help you realize your goals.

Vaibhav S
Myself, Vaibhav S is a Founder and Editor-in-Chief of TechnoGiants, working Software Professional, and an avid lover of Software's and Web Services. I love computers and also love to write and share about Tech-related Stuff, Computers etc with others.
https://technogiants.net/

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