What suddenly existed that allowed these breakthroughs to occur that did not exist before? What made technology conducive to Al breakthroughs that could not have happened years ago? Was it faster processors, smarter programming from the coding community or something else? What suddenly happened that permitted these breakthroughs to happen?
In: Technology
Two things: data, and computing power.
DATA – People have uploaded images for as long as there’s been an internet. But in 2006, an academic called Fei Fei Li started gathering and labelling them. By 2009, she and her team had a dataset of 14 million images, along with digital labels that said what was in each picture. This meant that they could start a competition to see who could write the best algorithm to predict what was in each picture. This competition launched in 2010. And now there were stakes, and bragging rights, and a reason to really delve into those weird algorithms that the CS community had ignored (because AI would not happen in our lifetime, they believed). The dataset is called ImageNet, and it really kicked off the innovations in machine learning.
COMPUTE – It’s all very well to have data, and even algorithms. But they won’t do you any good unless you had a huge beefy computer. Not a desktop, something much more powerful. Fortunately, in 2006, the online bookshop Amazon.com started renting out its spare computing power to whoever wanted to rent it. So you could open a browser and choose how much RAM and computing power you wanted, and you’d get an impossibly fast supercomputer ready to execute your program. Then you could stop renting it the second your program finished running. So rather than having to buy a million dollar supercomputer and set it up, you could just rent it for a few dollars. This meant that machine learning became available to everyone who understood it, not just people with a lot of money.
As a result of easy access to data and compute, all kinds of breakthroughs started happening starting in 2011.
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