The Growth of Artificial Intelligence

Writing for Techcrunch, Silicon Valley investor Vinod Khosla, the founder of Khosla Ventures discusses the impact of artificial intelligence in the future.


Kholsa analyses why we do not have the HAL 9000 and C3P0-style AI machines that last century seemed to promise.  He points to the areas where AI is actually having a huge impact.

Rather than the brute force logic-based development that was envisioned with Commander Data, successful systems have been built from examples rather than logical rules.  We essentially let the computer “figure it out” using lots of past problems and solutions that include probability assessment systems beyond any hard-coded rules. Reasoning under uncertain conditions underlies a major area of recent progress.

Khosla  sees AI impacting four main areas:


1. Bionic Software
 A post on bionic software defined as one that combines the biological and mechanical systems to create an enhanced system that is more powerful than either alone. “Bionic software,” in this sense, is the interplay of humans and computers augmenting each other’s actions and amplifying one another’s understanding (for a while at least, they can help and complement each other);


2. Supercomputer Power
A recent Forrester assessment that the iPad 2 in 1993 would be considered one of the top 30 most powerful computers on the planet and similar to a Cray supercomputer from 1986.


3. Costs continue to Fall
An Nvidia graphics chip designed primarily for video games today can be assembled into a five teraflop machine for less than $25,000 and can happily run powerful new programs (among many other types) called “self organizing machines” that determine the how (algorithms for geeks) if told the “what” (examples of right/wrong medical diagnosis or fraudulent transactions or unusual patterns of behavior or symptoms, for example).


4. Expert Systems
Finally, the fashion in big data in the venture capital business has injected a lot of new energy and exploration for using experts and expert systems, probability and statistics, machine learning, self organizing machines and many less-discussed and some yet-undisclosed systems. (Those stock traders seldom talk about what their computerized trading systems do, nor do the spooks or Google in its spam filtering algorithms). Data, and big data especially hold “truths & likely correlations” well beyond the biases of your average doctor, and unaffected by the distortions of pharmaceutical marketing and selective medical study reporting, or a desire to make more money, or other intentional and unintentional human failings.



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