The Next Big Thing: a new report on Machine Intelligence

Following two winter periods and too many high expectations, the situation is finally clear: anyone who wishes so can start with machine intelligence tomorrow. Even the major players such as Amazon, Microsoft and IBM are embracing the current ‘AI for all’ era. Big Data, Machine Learning and the cloud offer you the chance to make more intelligent organizational decisions. Is something still missing in your toolbox? In that case, you can simply go to GitHub and check what kind of tools e.g. Airbnb, Google and Facebook have donated in that area.

After Mobile, Big Data and the Internet of Things, Machine Intelligence is The Next Big Thing. Machine intelligence is the accelerator of these predecessors. Especially thanks to the extremely improved hardware plus the explosion of data (the sine qua non of self learning), we make breakthroughs in the field of this machine intelligence. There is good reason to greet the jubilee year - sixty years of artificial intelligence - with optimism. That is also reflected in the tripling of the number of startups in this field (in a year) and the huge investments made now by companies like IBM, Baidu, Salesforce, Toyota, Facebook and many others.

The practical approach to Machine Intelligence is that Amazon charges $0.42 for one hour of Machine Learning, Microsoft Azure Machine Learning gives you immediate access to cloud intelligence and IBM now has a billion dollar division to make your organization smarter. Airbnb’s building stones on GitHub and many others (including Google) can be added thereto; the developments follow in rapid succession. And let’s not forget the annual, increasing flow of startups, which are coached by venture capitalists. These companies pitch their products in a very specific way, by focusing on particular sectors and businesses. Healthcare, industry, agriculture, advertising companies, security, so basically any sector, can all benefit from the MI framework and this will lead to serious “rethinking”. How did we use to do this in the past and what is possible today? How will computers be able to assist – or even outpace, as you please – humans even more in the coming years? 

The technological possibilities that present themselves are new. The non-routine tasks, specially in the more “uncontrolled environments”, are the new IT hunting grounds. Also thanks to the core technologies of the Machine Intelligence landscape that we outlined to you, it is possible that computers enter these new areas. In particular, computer vision, machine learning, natural language processing and natural language generation, make that computers can better support human tasks or automate them completely. Computers learn to understand ordinary human language, decipher images and talk to us in ordinary human language. Cars that recognize a pedestrian and then take appropriate action, it is just one of the amazing capabilities of modern computers. The diagnosis of a disease or providing legal advice based on all existing jurisprudence, is just another astonishing accomplishment of machine intelligence. We are getting to a point where the founders of artificial intelligence have dreamed of for years.

You can download our first report on Machine Intelligence for free from the ICT Bookstore here.