The year 2020 is a historic year in a strange sense, although my strength of relentless optimism got challenged many times, but on a positive note personally this year for me, has been a year of exploration and collaboration. Never have I seen communities coming together to help each other out in coping in these tough times. Even tech folks, extended a helping hand to help people learning coding and development, by conducting free classes and I am happy to have contributed in my little way of helping managers learn applied Artificial Intelligence.
There is a lot that happened in the field of AI in 2020, but what is important to understand is,what is relevant for you and at Aimadesimple, my objective is to help everyone understand and appreciate the impact of AI is going to have in their lives. So here are the 5 Key Highlights
1. To Leverage the power of AI/ML, you are not required to have masters in data science
Now no more, you need to do a masters or phd in statistics or data science, for that matter you may not need to master the skills of coding, to leverage the power of AI. To get started you simply use the AutoML or API based model offered as services by CPS (cloud service providers) like google, Microsoft, Amazon and more. Now teams across the companies can access the power of AI, without needing to invest in learning the new technology.
Other than the CSP's , there are some extremely good low code/no code deep learning platforms which can help you develop enterprise grade AI/ML models through a simple drag and drop interface. You should try peltarion.com, lobe.ai and check out more here. Also along with basics of AI, I have covered these no coding tools along with project in my Udemy course - AI for Managers: The Complete Guide
2. Growing demand of people with AI + X experience
"X" is the domain experience. In all my corporate talks in 2020, I have been emphasising on one point, that domain experience is extremely critical when developing an AI model for any application and the below statement in a blog by Kian Katanforoosh where he states following statement - " Training a biotech engineer in AI could take months, but training an AI practitioner to understand biotechnologies could take years before meaningful output".
There will be demand for people with experience in Chemical engineering with an understanding of AI, similarly a Finance guy + AI, MBA + AI, SCM + AI. In this case experienced folks are not required to start learning coding and complex algorithms, but what they are required to do is to develop an AI mindset, so that they can start thinking on how AI can be applied in their domain and when it comes to developing an application, they can use tools mentioned above to get started. AI alone cannot do anything, only when it is married with domain experience, the magic happens.
3. AI helped world fight with the Devil: Covid-19
Honestly not very sure that whether AI or ML helped fasten the process of drug discovery or covid-19 vaccine development, but in al the articles I read they all suggest that AI did help scientists and researchers to analyse humungous amount of data, eventually helping to speed up the discovery process.
In the new normal of low touch economy, AI is playing a crucial role, from facial recognition based attendance system, gesture based activity recognition, remote temperature detection, OCR based text extraction, bot based interaction, camera based social distancing monitoring and more https://www.aimadesimple.com/ai-in-covid .
4. GPT3 was the naughty highlight of 2020
On June 11th, OpenAI released GPT3 (Autoregressive Transformer language model) and world wide web went crazy, you really don't need to understand the above terminologies, but you need to understand that why did the world go crazy.
So what is GPT3, its is one of the most powerful language model, the deep neural net has been trained on 570gb of text information available on the internet, giving it the ability to generate text of that it can get difficult to differentiate from human generated text, it can answer queries, shorten long paragraph and one of the most exciting one is writing code by itself with little training. Although it is a still a long way from being as good as a human, but yes its the next big bold step towards the future.
5. AI ethics and Governance
AI by definition is to make machines mimic the human brain and we humans live with so many biases, thus it became growingly important that these machines are also not trained on these biases, otherwise it will become really difficult to believe and rely on the outcomes of these machines.
While the techies, researchers, scientists and business are in a constant pursuit to advance AI and make it more robust, intelligent and yeah human like, society at large has realised that if AI ethics, governance frameworks are not in place, then it can create problems. One of the outcomes of this realisation is strict compliance to EU GDPR and more frameworks are coming forth to keep a check that AI does not become the next new evil.
Thats it from me in 2020, I sincerely hope that 2021 brings back happiness and hope of better world. Incase you are looking to take an online course on developing an AI mindset, do checkout the course developed by me on Udemy : AI for Managers: The Complete Guide.
References
State of AI : https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1ZUimafgXCBSLsgbacd6-a-dqO7yLyzIl1ZJbiCBUUT4/edit?usp=sharing
https://www.twilio.com/blog/ultimate-guide-openai-gpt-3-language-mode