Is Artificial Intelligence Real?

I’ve been at some non-tech conferences over the last few weeks and I’d like to share my thoughts on two related themes that have come up a number of times:

• Does AI exist?
• AI is nothing special, it is just a decision tree. 

If we start with does AI exist, the answer is yes and no. No as it is actually a term to describe a group of technologies, so AI may not exist, but Neural Networks, Computer Vision, and Semantic Understanding amongst others do exist. However, as these were not tech events, we can assume that the argument wasn’t about the collective name for technologies. Instead, the question was more around do these technologies do anything? 

Related to that question was a number of comments from people who had bought AI based systems from vendors, but seeing it action they were disappointed as the tool seemed to be following a very obvious tree, so if A&B happen, do C. 

AI, or the components of it, does exist and can provide value today. Sometimes the end results do seem obvious to us, such as when it correctly recognises a number you have just said. This doesn’t diminish the level of technology that is necessary for a machine to do something we do easily. Sometimes we are disappointed that the end-result is obvious to us, such as the machine recognising that someone who says they have missed their flight is sounding concerned. Sometimes we cannot figure out why the AI has come up with a result, but we do agree. 

In all these cases, this is AI in action, allowing machines to do things we can do easily, but also things that we can’t. 

There is a problem though with vendor stories. AI is the thing to have to make a sale today, just as Big Data or BlockChain were in the recent past. Not all solutions really use AI in any meaningful way (apart from supporting the sales material). There isn’t an easy answer to work out what is real and what isn′t, but in general if the system is understanding sentences that have been written or spoken, can understand images, or is making sense of data that you can’t, then it is probably a genuine AI based system. If on the other hand it is a simple decision tree where you write the rules and the system is looking for particular keywords, then look for another supplier.