AI Goes Vertical

About this book

In 1950 a mathematician asked whether machines could think. For the next sixty years the honest answer was: not yet, and not soon. Two funding winters, a chess match and a thousand broken promises later, something changed. In 2012 a program running on two video game graphics cards learned to recognise pictures better than anything before it. In 2016 a machine played a move at the ancient game of Go that no human master would have played, and won. In 2017 a team of researchers published a new design called the transformer. In November 2022 a chatbot reached a hundred million users in about two months. By 2026 AI systems were completing hours of expert work on their own, a robotaxi service was carrying more than half a million paid passengers a week, and the world's most valuable company made chips for AI.