The field of artificial intelligence has never lacked for hype. Back in 1965, AI pioneer Herb Simon declared, “Machines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work a man can do.” That hasn’t happened — but there certainly have been noteworthy advances, especially with the rise of “deep learning” systems, in which programs plow through massive data sets looking for patterns, and then try to make predictions. Perhaps most famously, AIs that use deep learning can now beat the best human Go players (some years after computers bested humans at chess and Jeopardy).
Mastering language has proven tougher, but a program called GPT-3, developed by OpenAI, can produce human-like text, including poetry and prose, in response to prompts. Deep learning systems are also getting better and better at recognizing faces, and recognizing images in general. And they have contributed to the software behind self-driving vehicles, in which the automobile industry has been investing billions.