AGI is just around the corner

The Origins of AI

The dream of making computers as intelligent as humans dates back to the early age of computers themselves. Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is the field that explores this idea. One approach to developing AI is the use of artificial neural networks. In 1957, psychologist Frank Rosenblatt introduced the perceptron, which mimicked the workings of nerve cells. The New York Times reported this as the embryo of a computer that would eventually walk, see, talk, write, reproduce itself, and be self-aware. Rosenblatt used a single perceptron to try to distinguish between male and female images, which, unsurprisingly, was not successful. However, Geoffrey Hinton believed in and furthered this idea, convinced that artificial neural networks could enable computers to learn on their own, without being explicitly programmed. Hinton developed multi-layered neural networks that could process and categorize image data. Despite some success in image recognition, the lack of substantial data for training and the insufficient computing power at the time meant that artificial neural networks did not achieve widespread success in various tasks. Consequently, interest in neural networks waned, and the focus shifted to symbolic approaches, which involved extracting and encoding knowledge for computers to use.