Artificial intelligence: Frequently asked questions about AI

May 9, 2023

The advancement of artificial intelligence is progressing at a breakneck pace. While the technology is changing rapidly, the basic principles behind AI aren’t new.

Artificial intelligence has been around for many years, and has been expanded upon by many different developers. Today, some of the most well known AIs include chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Bard, with many more on the way.

These AIs have become more sophisticated and refined over the course of many iterations. These advancements are bringing AI to levels reaching what would be considered “strong AI,” a machine that essentially has the same capabilities as a human mind.

Following are links to articles that answer some of the most-asked questions about AI.

What is AI?What are the four main types of artifical intelligence What is the history of AI?What are the dangers of AI?What is ChatGPT?What is Google Bard?How is Bing using ChatGPT?What is BERT?How do tech titans feel about AI? Thoughts from Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg

1. What is AI?

AI, or artificial intelligence, is a branch of computer science that is designed to understand and store human intelligence, and mimic human capabilities including completing tasks, processing human language and performing speech recognition. AI is the leading innovation in technology today and its primary goal is to eliminate tedious tasks and assist in immediately accessing extremely detailed and hyper-focused information and data.

2. What are the four main types of artifical intelligence?

The four main types of AI are reactive machines, limited memory, theory of mind and self-awareness. The most basic forms of AI are reactive machines and limited memory. Theory of mind and self-awareness are two stages in AI that are theoretical as of now, as they are still being developed. In the future, these two forms of AI could come to fruition. For a machine to reach the self-awareness stage of development, the most complex stage, it would need to possess the ability to form its own identity and become self-aware, as its name implies.

3. What is the history of AI?

While there are many recent developments in the AI field, its premise is not new, and the history of AI dates back to before chatbots. Some of the earliest names in AI were Alan Turing, who created the Turing machine, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, who expanded upon Turing’s ideas and John McCarthy, who coined the term “artificial intelligence.”

4. What are the dangers of AI?

The emergence of artificial intelligence has led to feelings of uncertainty, fear, and even hatred toward a technology that most people do not fully understand. AI can automate tasks that previously only humans could complete, such as writing an essay, organizing an event, and learning another language.

However, experts worry that the era of unregulated AI systems may create misinformation, cyber-security threats, job loss, and political bias.

5. What is ChatGPT?

ChatGPT is a sophisticated artificial intelligence chatbot developed by AI research company OpenAI. The AI technology was added to Microsoft products including Bing, the corporation’s search engine.

ChatGPT is a generative AI that is capable of producing content from text to images, having conversations with humans, suggesting edits to computer programming code and more. The chatbot has the ability to answer questions or assist humans in queries or tasks through its vast training using social media, websites, articles, datasets, books and other forms of text on the internet.

6. What is Google Bard?

Bard is one of the newest artificial intelligence chatbots. The AI chatbot, created by Google, was released in March 2023, after an initial announcement in February. The software was released to a limited amount of users for testing.

The chatbot comes on the heels of the release of one of its major competitors, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and has very similar functions to that model.

7. How is Bing using ChatGPT?

Bing’s new AI search engine program uses ChatGPT language modeling to provide its users with detailed human-like responses to questions and other inquiries.

Microsoft, which owns Bing, and Google are working to create the most interactive and accurate chatbot possible in order to drive more engagement from users.

8. What is BERT?

It is no secret that artificial intelligence impacts society in surprising ways. One way that most people have used AI without their knowledge is when searching on Google. When doing so, it is likely that the searcher unknowingly used BERT, or Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers, in the form of an artificial intelligence algorithm since about 10% of all searches utilize it. This framework has allowed Google to recognize how users search by better understanding words within their correct order and context. BERT is more than just a part of Google’s algorithm, though. As an open-source framework, anyone can use it for a wide array of machine-learning tasks.

9. How do tech titans feel about AI? Thoughts from Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg

With the growing presence of artificial intelligence in the everyday lives of people around the world, many tech leaders have spoken out about the controversial and revolutionary new technology.

Some of the biggest names in tech have differing opinions on AI and how it will impact society as a whole, but most argue that ultimately the technology will benefit humanity.