Artificial Intelligence Now

Introduction

The phrase “artificial intelligence” has a way of retreating into the future: as things that were once in the realm of imagination and fiction become reality, they lose their wonder and become “machine translation,” “real-time traffic updates,” “self-driving cars,” and more. But the past 12 months have seen a true explosion in the capacities as well as adoption of AI technologies. While the flavor of these developments has not pointed to the “general AI” of science fiction, it has come much closer to offering generalized AI tools—these tools are being deployed to solve specific problems. But now they solve them more powerfully than the complex, rule-based tools that preceded them. More importantly, they are flexible enough to be deployed in many contexts. This means that more applications and industries are ripe for transformation with AI technologies.

This book, drawing from the best posts on the O’Reilly AI blog, brings you a summary of the current state of AI technologies and applications, as well as a selection of useful guides to getting started with deep learning and AI technologies.

Part I covers the overall landscape of AI, focusing on the platforms, businesses, and business models are shaping the growth of AI. We then turn to the technologies underlying AI, particularly deep learning, in Part II. Part III brings us some “hobbyist” applications: intelligent robots. Even if you don’t build them, they are an incredible illustration of the low cost of entry into ...