Artificial intelligence (AI) is an enabling technology that allows organizations to automate and improve complex, dynamic processes. This frees human capital to work on higher impact tasks and unlock new business models. AI can also perform repetitive and tedious jobs that are too time-consuming or dangerous for humans to safely complete. For example, robots can replace workers performing repetitive and dangerous jobs on assembly lines. AI can also be used to process a large volume of data, providing insights and recommendations faster than human experts could.
AI breakthroughs have been fueled by advances in machine learning algorithms, which enable computers to learn and improve over time. For instance, the invention of recurrent neural networks and long short-term memory (LSTM) in 1997 allowed AI systems to better understand and learn sequential data, resulting in more accurate speech recognition and text translation algorithms. Generative AI is a type of AI that can generate content or patterns based on inputs like words in sentences, shapes in images and frames of videos. Variational autoencoders (VAEs), diffusion models and flow-based models are examples of generative AI technologies.
In 2024, Demis Hassabis and his team won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing an algorithm called AlphaFold 2, which was integral to predicting complex amino acid sequences needed for creating medicines, vaccines and materials such as batteries, steel and plastic. This is considered a groundbreaking advancement in generative AI, which has the potential to accelerate scientific research in a variety of fields.
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