Što je umjetna inteligencija (AI)?

The concept of inanimate objects endowed with intelligence has been around since ancient times. The Greek god Hephaestus was depicted in myths as forging robot-like servants out of gold. Engineers in ancient Egypt built statues of gods animated by priests. Throughout the centuries, thinkers from Aristotle to the 13th century Spanish theologian Ramon Llull to René Descartes and Thomas Bayes used the tools and logic of their times to describe human thought processes as symbols, laying the foundation for AI concepts such as general knowledge representation.

The late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries brought forth the foundational work that would give rise to the modern computer. In 1836, Cambridge University mathematician Charles Babbage and Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace, invented the first design for a programmable machine.

1940s. Princeton mathematician John Von Neumann conceived the architecture for the stored-program computer — the idea that a computer’s program and the data it processes can be kept in the computer’s memory. And Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts laid the foundation for neural networks.

1950s. With the advent of modern computers, scientists could test their ideas about machine intelligence. One method for determining whether a computer has intelligence was devised by the British mathematician and World War II code-breaker Alan Turing. The Turing test focused on a computer’s ability to fool interrogators into believing its responses to their questions were made by a human being.

1956. The modern field of artificial intelligence is widely cited as starting this year during a summer conference at Dartmouth College. Sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the conference was attended by 10 luminaries in the field, including AI pioneers Marvin Minsky, Oliver Selfridge and John McCarthy, who is credited with coining the term artificial intelligence. Also in attendance were Allen Newell, a computer scientist, and Herbert A. Simon, an economist, political scientist and cognitive psychologist. The two presented their groundbreaking Logic Theorist, a computer program capable of proving certain mathematical theorems and referred to as the first AI program.

1950s and 1960s. In the wake of the Dartmouth College conference, leaders in the fledgling field of AI predicted that a man-made intelligence equivalent to the human brain was around the corner, attracting major government and industry support. Indeed, nearly 20 years of well-funded basic research generated significant advances in AI: For example, in the late 1950s, Newell and Simon published the General Problem Solver (GPS) algorithm, which fell short of solving complex problems but laid the foundations for developing more sophisticated cognitive architectures; and McCarthy developed Lisp, a language for AI programming still used today. In the mid-1960s, MIT Professor Joseph Weizenbaum developed ELIZA, an early NLP program that laid the foundation for today’s chatbots.

1970s and 1980s. The achievement of artificial general intelligence proved elusive, not imminent, hampered by limitations in computer processing and memory and by the complexity of the problem. Government and corporations backed away from their support of AI research, leading to a fallow period lasting from 1974 to 1980 known as the first “AI Winter.” In the 1980s, research on deep learning techniques and industry’s adoption of Edward Feigenbaum’s expert systems sparked a new wave of AI enthusiasm, only to be followed by another collapse of government funding and industry support. The second AI winter lasted until the mid-1990s.

1990s. Increases in computational power and an explosion of data sparked an AI renaissance in the late 1990s that set the stage for the remarkable advances in AI we see today. The combination of big data and increased computational power propelled breakthroughs in NLP, computer vision, robotics, machine learning and deep learning. In 1997, as advances in AI accelerated, IBM’s Deep Blue defeated Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, becoming the first computer program to beat a world chess champion.

2000s. Further advances in machine learning, deep learning, NLP, speech recognition and computer vision gave rise to products and services that have shaped the way we live today. These include the 2000 launch of Google’s search engine and the 2001 launch of Amazon’s recommendation engine. Netflix developed its recommendation system for movies, Facebook introduced its facial recognition system and Microsoft launched its speech recognition system for transcribing speech into text. IBM launched Watson and Google started its self-driving initiative, Waymo.

2010s. The decade between 2010 and 2020 saw a steady stream of AI developments. These include the launch of Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa voice assistants; IBM Watson’s victories on Jeopardy; self-driving cars; the development of the first generative adversarial network; the launch of TensorFlow, Google’s open source deep learning framework; the founding of research lab OpenAI, developers of the GPT-3 language model and Dall-E image generator; the defeat of world Go champion Lee Sedol by Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo; and the implementation of AI-based systems that detect cancers with a high degree of accuracy.

2020s. The current decade has seen the advent of generative AI, a type of artificial intelligence technology that can produce new content. Generative AI starts with a prompt that could be in the form of a text, an image, a video, a design, musical notes or any input that the AI system can process. Various AI algorithms then return new content in response to the prompt. Content can include essays, solutions to problems, or realistic fakes created from pictures or audio of a person. The abilities of language models such as ChatGPT-3, Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Megatron-Turing NLG have wowed the world, but the technology is still in early stages, as evidenced by its tendency to hallucinate or skew answers.