The growth of AI

Over the last few years, artificial intelligence (AI) has worked its way into every area of our lives. If you’re a programmer, chances are you’ve started working with GitHub’s Copilot, an AI tool that turns natural language prompts into coding suggestions to expedite programming. If you’re a writer, you might have come across OpenAI’s GPT-3 or similar autoregressive language models that use deep learning to create human-like text. It was just a few years ago such AI programs were in their infancy. Now they are becoming ubiquitous tools in writing and coding.

The underlying building blocks of the technology are getting astonishingly better at an exponential rate, far outpacing our expectations. Techniques like deep learning allow us to run complex AI models to solve the most difficult problems. But while those who work in technology-centric careers are aware of AI’s explosive capabilities, the public at large is still largely unaware of the depth of AI’s potential.