The Four Waves of AI

Paraphrased summary of the chapter "The Four Waves of AI" from book AI Superpowers by Dr. Kai-Fu Lee

The complete AI revolution will take a little time and will ultimately wash over us in a series of four waves: 

• Internet AI
• Business AI
• Perception AI
• Autonomous AI

The first two waves—internet AI and business AI—are already all around us. Perception AI is now digitizing our physical world, learning to recognize our faces, understand our requests, and “see” the world around us. Autonomous AI will come last but will have the deepest impact on our lives.

This first wave of Internet AI began almost fifteen years ago but finally went mainstream around 2012. Internet AI is largely about using AI algorithms as recommendation engines: systems that learn our personal preferences and then serve up content hand-picked for us. The horsepower of these AI engines depends on the digital data they have access to, and there’s currently no greater storehouse of this data than the major internet companies. Examples - YouTube, Toutiao

First-wave AI leverages the fact that internet users are automatically labeling data as they browse. Business AI takes advantage of the fact that traditional companies have also been automatically labeling huge quantities of data for decades. Business AI mines these databases for hidden correlations that often escape the naked eye and human brain. Examples - RXThinking, Element AI, iFlyTek

Algorithms can now group the pixels from a photo or video into meaningful clusters and recognize objects in much the same way our brain does. Instead of merely storing audio files as collections of digital bits, algorithms can now both pick out words and often parse the meaning of full sentences. Third-wave AI is all about extending and expanding this power throughout our lived environment, digitizing the world around us through the proliferation of sensors and smart devices. These devices are turning our physical world into digital data that can then be analyzed and optimized by deep-learning algorithms. Examples - Amazon Echo, Xiaomi (pronounced “sheow-me”) Mi AI speaker, Alibaba’s City Brain

Autonomous AI represents the integration and culmination of the three preceding waves (Internet AI, Business AI and Perception AI) fusing the ability of machines to optimize from extremely complex data sets with their newfound sensory powers. Autonomous AI will surface first in the commercial settings (like factories, warehouses, farms and will come in the form of intelligent robots, autonomous drones, self-driving cars) because these robots create a tangible return on investment by doing the jobs of workers who are either growing more expensive or harder to find. Examples - autonomous beetle-like robots in Amazon’s warehouses, swarms of autonomous drones from DJI, the world’s premier drone maker