Artificial Intelligence Explainer: The Martech Glossary
(
Artificial Intelligence
) is the simulation of human intelligence processes by computer systems. In
MarTech
, AI is used for personalisation,
predictive analytics
, automation and more.
AI captured public imagination in recent times, when
ChatGPT
developed by
OpenAI
was launched as a "research preview" on November 30, 2022. Within a week, the world was talking about the development.
However, the origins of Artificial Intelligence (AI) can be traced back to the mid-20th century, with its roots in mathematics, philosophy and computer science. While the idea of creating intelligent machines has been contemplated for centuries, the modern field of AI as an academic discipline began in the 1950s.
The formal beginning of AI as a field of research is widely considered to be the Dartmouth Workshop in 1956. This summer conference, organised by John McCarthy, brought together leading researchers to discuss the possibility of creating "thinking machines." It was at this workshop that McCarthy coined the term "artificial intelligence."
Before this pivotal event, several key figures laid the groundwork for the future of AI.
Alan Turing, often called the "father of computer science," explored the concept of machine intelligence in his 1950 paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence". He proposed the Turing Test, a method for determining if a machine could exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from that of a human.
In 1943, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts published a paper that provided a mathematical description of how neurons in the brain might work, which was a crucial step toward the development of artificial neural networks.
Arthur Samuel, a computer scientist at IBM, created a checkers program in the early 1950s that could learn from its own experience and improve its gameplay, a foundational example of machine learning.
Following the Dartmouth Workshop, the field of AI experienced periods of rapid growth and setbacks, often referred to as "AI winters".
The early years saw a great deal of optimism and progress. Researchers like Marvin Minsky, Allen Newell, and Herbert A Simon developed some of the first AI programs, including the Logic Theorist, which could solve mathematical theorems.
The decade of the 1970s marked the first "AI winter," as funding and interest waned due to the failure of AI to deliver on its ambitious promises.
In the 1980s, a resurgence of interest occurred with the rise of "expert systems," which were designed to mimic the decision-making of human experts in specific domains.
From the 1990s, the emergence of machine learning approaches and the first major AI victories in games, such as IBM's Deep Blue defeating world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997 were highlights in the progress of AI.
The current "AI boom" has been fueled by the availability of vast amounts of data, increased computational power, and the development of
deep learning techniques
, particularly with the introduction of the transformer architecture in 2017, which has been instrumental in the creation of large language models like GPT.
The public release of ChatGPT in late 2022 was a landmark moment, as it brought the power of this technology to a wide audience and sparked a massive surge of interest and investment in
Generative AI
.
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For the last few years, the company has been working feverishly to upgrade the AI inside Alexa. It has been a slog. Replacing the AI technology inside a voice assistant isn't as easy as swapping in a new model, and the Alexa remodel was reportedly delayed by internal struggles and technical challenges along the way. LLMs also aren't a perfect match for this kind of product, which not only needs to work with tons of preexisting services and millions of Alexa-enabled devices but also needs to reliably perform basic finally, the new Alexa -- known as Alexa+ -- is here. It's a big, ambitious remodel that is trying to marry the conversational skills of generative AI chatbots with the daily tasks that the old Alexa did which has been available to testers through an early-access program for a few months, is now being rolled out more widely. I got it recently after I bought a compatible device (the Echo Show 8, which has an 8-inch screen) and enrolled in the upgraded version. (Prime members will get Alexa+ at no cost, while non-Prime members will have to pay $19.99 per month.)The New York Times recently announced a licensing deal with Amazon, which will allow Amazon to use Times content in its AI systems, including Alexa+. The Times is also suing OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and Microsoft for alleged copyright violations related to the training of AI systems.I have good news and bad news for my fellow good news is that the new Alexa+ is, in fact, more fun to talk to than the old one, with more realistic synthetic voices and a more humanlike cadence. (There are eight voices to choose from; I used the default setting, an upbeat female voice.)And I liked some of Alexa+'s new capabilities, such as booking a table at a restaurant and generating long stories and reading them to my new Alexa is also better at handling multistep requests. "Set three kitchen timers for 15, 25 and 45 minutes" and "write a one-day itinerary for a trip to San Diego and send it to my email" were two prompts that worked for Alexa+ doesn't require you to say its wake word every time you talk to it, so you can go back and forth or ask it follow-up questions, which is a nice bad news is that despite its new capabilities, Alexa+ is too buggy and unreliable for me to recommend. In my testing, it not only lagged behind ChatGPT's voice mode and other AI voice assistants I've tried but also was noticeably worse than the original Alexa at some basic I asked Alexa+ to cancel an alarm the other morning -- a request I had made to the old Alexa hundreds of times with no issues -- it simply ignored I emailed a research paper to alexa@ in order to hear Alexa+ summarize it while I washed the dishes, I got an error message saying the document couldn't be also hallucinated some facts and made some inexplicable errors. When I asked it to look up Wirecutter 's recommended box grater and add it to my Amazon cart, it responded that "according to Wirecutter, the best box grater is the OXO Good Grips Box Grater." Wirecutter's actual box grater pick is the Cuisipro 4-Sided Box Grater. Luckily, I caught the mistake before ordering. When I asked Alexa+ to walk me through installing a new AI model on my laptop, it got tripped up and started repeating, "Oh, no, my wires got crossed."And I didn't have access to some of the new Alexa+ features Amazon advertised, such as a "routine" feature that triggers several different actions when a user enters a room. 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