Five times Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning were in the news in 2017

What followed was talks surrounding employees looking to unionize, to which the top brass of IT stated that reskilling, and not unionizing would be the best option for all the stakeholders in the sector. Employees who were able to deal with machine learning and AI operations and maintenance would now get the top jobs in IT.

Artificial Intelligence defeats the best DOTA 2 players:

The capabilities of Artificial Intelligence were demonstrated by an AI bot that defeated the world’s best players of DOTA 2, an online game. This was big as DOTA is a complex and very popular game usually played between two teams of five players each. The objective of each team is to seize and destroy other team’s base.

Professional tournaments with huge cash prizes (running into millions) show just how much time and effort it takes to make oneself proficient in a game like this. The top players play the game on a full-time basis.

The bot, created by OpenAI, defeated world’s best players in the game in one-on-one battles. Elon Musk, who runs the startup, celebrated the bot's victory in a tweet.

Earlier, a bot that utilized machine learning also managed to defeat a world championship player in GO, a Japanese board game that uses several permutations and combinations.

Interestingly, Elon Musk set up this company to prevent any AI to take over human civilization as we know it. Musk is very wary of AI, even going so far as to say that the threat of AI is even bigger than that of North Korea.

Also read: Elon Musk's out-of-the-world beliefs and theories

The Facebook Story:

While AI and machine learning are concepts that people think they understand, not many do know what they actually entail. The lack of knowledge, coupled with the outright paranoia of being replaced by machines gave it the right conditions to stir up the pot.

The news about the social media giant reportedly pulling the plug on an Artificial Intelligence (AI) program after they found out that the chatbots involved developed their own language particularly drove people’s anxiety levels through the roof.

It turned out that Facebook did stop the chatbot program after the chatbots were speaking in code. But it was not because that they were afraid that the bots are trying to overthrow their human overseers.

A BBC report states that what actually could have happened is that the bots were trying to experiment with language so as to optimize the interactions that they were having. The chat between the two bots looked like this:

Bob: "I can can I I everything else"

Alice: "Balls have zero to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to me to"

Which could have been the bots trying to negotiate with each other more effectively. A Forbes article stated that since this was not in the scope of interest for the developers at Facebook, for the time being, they decided to shut down the project and that was that.

Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg were also famously known to have a Twitter spar over the same issue of AI being beneficial or detrimental to the human civilization.

The BBC report stated that this was apparently nothing new, even Google reported that its translation software had done this during development. "The network must be encoding something about the semantics of the sentence," Google said in a blog.

The self-driving cars:

Google’s Waymo, a technology company that aims to develop self-driving cars made the news a lot of times as it hit milestone after milestone this year.

In fact, Google was so committed to the cause of developing this technology that it built an entire city developed in the desert of California just so that the neural network that can learn from enough real-life scenarios.

Castle is a 100-acre ‘fake town’ in the Californian desert and is named after Castle Air Force base near the town of Merced.

The campus had a testing area, lots of roads, intersections and driveways. Besides, there are portable buildings and domed garages, which house cars used for training and testing purposes.

The testing site also has a lot of props such as dummies, cones, fake plants, tricycles, balls, dolls, skateboards which are used by the company for training purposes.

Though several companies across the world are in the process of developing autonomous cars, as of December, a Verge report states that the company has clocked in 4 million miles (or 6437376 km)

Not one to fall back, even the likes of Uber, Volvo and Nissan are coming up to speed. Nissan even stated that it will come with such a cars by 2022.

For all the hype about driverless cars across the developed countries, the possibility was still far away when it comes to India.

A new planet is discovered with Google’s AI:

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft discovered an eighth planet with the help of Google’s neural network technology in mid-December. It did so by looking at a data collected by a photometer, a machine that measures the brightness of stars, and saw a pattern develop where the star began to dim and brighten up periodically.

This suggested that there was a planet that was blocking the path of the star for that particular period. It noted the period of time between two successive intervals of the light brightening and dimming. Using this data, the team discovered the length of its orbit and the size of the planet.

The neural network vastly speeded up the process by analyzing and sorting out the data, which was in the form of signals. Now we know that the eighth planet, named Kepler 90-I, is a hot planet with an average temperature of 423 degrees Celsius and a rocky terrain.

Much research is still being done under AI and machine learning. While these were astounding achievements that our intelligent machines have undertaken, scientist believe that we might just have scratched the surface of its capabilities. One can only hope for even greater leaps and bounds for human civilization with the help of A.I in the coming years.