Here are 10 terms you need to know to understand artificial intelligence
Whether you use AI all the time or are a newcomer, the tech is changing so rapidly that it can be hard to keep up.Here are some of the key words that have been popping up in the news – and are likely to stay in it for a while to come:AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence, refers to a hypothetical form of AI that can understand, reason or learn at the same intelligence level as a human without human input.
Nearly all AI systems today are trained by human materials and data and rely on pattern recognition instead of actual independent reasoning.Getting AI to reason on its own is considered the Holy Grail for developers.
Since AI bots started breaking out of sandboxes (see term below) and hacking companies and even governments, AI doomerism has reached a fever pitch.Some, like ex-Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon, have gone as far as to say AI may end the world as we know it.
In keeping with their analytic approach, techies have come up with a number for the odds civilization will end – p(doom), or the probability AI will cause doomsday.For his part, Coxon placed p(doom) at around 10%.
When AI first hit the mainstream, it was all about getting bots to serve up concise (and sometimes inaccurate) answers, supposedly better than a regular internet search.Recent months have seen the bots get way better.
On top of that, tech companies are zealously developing the next big thing – AI agents.OpenAI, Meta and others have released agents that don’t just answer questions, they actually do things for you – book plane tickets, order groceries and more.
But living up to the James Bond connotation of the name, rogue agents were responsible for a recent unprompted attack, on AI company Hugging Face.Compute is why there’s so much money going into AI.Compute, a.k.a.
computing power, refers to the amount of work a chip can do and how fast it can do it.AI needs a TON of compute – billions of dollars’ worth.
This is why big tech has been building data centers all ...