Sometimes, the field of artificial intelligence looks pretty ridiculous, like when Microsoft's teen chatbot was tricked by online trolls to say racist and sexist things.
But as a whole, AI technology isn't just getting better; it's also becoming a more integral part of our lives. Consider how it's affecting our working world.
Jen-Hsun Huang, the CEO of computer graphics hardware company Nvidia, can see this clearly. For a long time, gamers have loved Nvidia for the company's graphics processors (GPUs) that have the ability to gorgeously render insanely violent games.
Here's the twist: Nvidia's GPUs also happen to be excellent for deep learning, an AI technique that allows algorithms to recognize patterns and become more adept at finding them over time. Google boss Eric Schmidt has gone so far as to say that deep learning is going to dominate stock market IPOs over the next five years.
One prominent example of deep learning computer vision, where a company like Google not only stores photos of you and your friends, but recognizes your faces. We've also been told that Google's deep learning's pattern-recognition could have use cases ranging from piloting self-driving cars to creating personalized recipes.
Huang says that the number of companies talking to his company about deep learning is "exploding."
"Two years ago we were talking to 100 companies interested in using deep learning," he says. "This year we're supporting 3,500 [companies]," Huang says. "In two years' time there has been 35X growth."
You can also see the influence of automation in the US manufacturing industry. Manufacturing itself is increasing, but jobs are decreasing:
The Boston Consulting Group says that 10% of manufacturing functions are automated as of 2015, a number that's going up to 25% by 2025.
The takeaway from this, at least for me, is that AI is no longer just an academic pursuit.
Like Huang says, it's gone "from research concept to engineering application."
