Andrew Ng sees AI as the new electricity, able to transform every industry on earth. But he noted that the term ‘AI’ actually applies to two distinct types: artificial general intelligence (AGI) or sentient AI, which has actually seen little progress, and artificial narrow intelligence (ANI), which is where nearly all major leaps have been made and which is already driving tremendous economic value.
AI will be important to enterprises of all kinds in the near future, but it’s critical not to equate progress in ANI with fears about AGI—for the practical reason that advances in AGI are so distant that it makes no sense to worry about them yet.
Within ANI, supervised learning and deep learning enable automation on steroids. In deciding what activities to automate using AI, apply the one-second rule of AI: pretty much anything you can do with one second of human thought can be automated with AI.
Beyond the more familiar applications of AI, such as online advertising, the most exciting AI developments are emerging for manufacturing, healthcare (including mental healthcare), agriculture, and even traditionally non-technical pursuits such as chicken farming. For any enterprise interesting in transforming from a great company to a great AI company, Ng defined what it means to be a great AI company and presented a five-point roadmap for how to get there.