Five amazing things AI is doing that will blow your mind
By: Mark Farragher
Tags: Machine Learning, Deep Learning, Artificial Intelligence

I read an interesting comment on LinkedIn the other day.

Someone commented that the AI hype is totally overblown, and that fundamentally a neural network is just a very complex machine.

A machine can can never produce anything that hasn’t been programmed in beforehand.

This guy was an artist, and he wasn’t worried about his job at all. Because how could a machine ever produce anything unexpected and creative?

I see this opinion a lot.

People tend to underestimate what AI can do.

They put people in one category and machines in another.

People are creative, intelligent, and spontaneous. Machines are logical, linear, and predictable.

But our brain is also a machine.

And what we call ‘machine learning’ is just our attempt to build a tiny artificial brain inside a computer.

There’s no reason to believe a computer cannot do what humans can do.

So here are 5 amazing things AI can do right now that will blow your mind.

AI can make realistic phone calls

Not so long ago, Google wowed the world by demonstrating an AI system that could hold a natural conversation over the phone. Their Duplex app successfully made a call with a hair salon and booked an appointment. The lady at the hair salon had no clue that she was talking to a computer.

Watch the video here:

AI can find missing children

When the Delhi police started a trial with an AI system that can recognize faces, the first thing they did was train it on a database of missing children. Then they took pictures of over 40,000 children in orphanages all over the country.

It took the AI system only 4 days to identify 2930 children. Almost three thousand children were reunited with their parents.

Read the article here: https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/facial-recognition…

AI can look through walls

MIT recently announced that they had built an AI system that could literally ‘see’ people moving behind walls.

They hooked up a neural network to a WIFI antenna and trained it to recognize the radio signals being bounced off people’s bodies. Over time, the network learned to recognize people and track their movements exactly, even in the dark or when they move behind walls.

Watch the video here:

AI can diagnose disease by looking at your eyes

To diagnose eye diseases, doctors often use an OCT scan. This is a scan where a beam of infrared light is bounced off the interior surfaces of the eye, to create a 3D scan of the eye tissues.

Google’s DeepMind division trained a neural network on a database of OCT scans and then let it compete with a panel of doctors. The AI managed to match the doctor’s diagnosis in 94% of all cases.

This is an astounding result. Six percent more, and the AI would have been exactly as accurate as a panel of human doctors.

Read more: https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/13/17670156/deepmi…

AI can create original art

I’ve written before about Generative Adversarial Networks, or GANs, and how you can use them to create original art.

Robbie Barrat, a researcher at NVIDIA, did exactly that. He trained a GAN to produce nude portraits, and something very interesting happened. During training, the AI got stuck in a local minimum and started producing hallucinogenic nudes that have a distinctive Salvador Dali-like quality to them.

Robbie liked the result so much that he stopped training and started publishing the images as original art.

Read more: https://www.artnome.com/news/2018/3/29/ai-art-just…

So what do you think? Did I convince you that machines can do everything that we humans can do?

Leave a comment and let me know!