AI is touted to change the world as we know it. Every industry is looking at leveraging the capabilities of AI and associated technologies such as machine learning and deep learning. AI promises to transform businesses by offering deep insights and blazing quick and accurate analysis. However, to be able to perform expert analysis, AI has to have much more than raw computational power—it needs to have intelligence that can rival humans. The seeds of that intelligence are being sown today by training AI.
An AI system tries to mimic human intelligence in making informed decisions. For this, training AI exhaustively becomes critical. The more information an AI system is fed, the better it gets at exhibiting human-like intelligence. Training AI needs images, text, sounds, audio conversations, videos, gestures, and other myriad forms of information to be fed to it. And some companies are doing precisely that. They are using the intelligence of humans that are fed to deep learning algorithms to make these algorithms progressively better.
Training AI
Driverless cars, which are the prime examples of AI use in everyday life, needs extensive training to identify people and objects on roads. The AI algorithms powering the split-second decisions that driverless cars need to make are fed millions of images. This trains them to correctly identify things in correct context and take a decision based on that. The driverless cars of tomorrow are getting trained using millions of images and will soon make their debut.
Similarly, chatbots have gained massive popularity over the past year or so. This is because they can mimic the behavior of an actual human customer care representative. While it’s easy to answer straight-forward questions, the conversation with a customer might also require dynamic thinking, something pretty hard to achieve for an AI system. Again, to make a chatbot AI better, it needs training on real-life conversations. A large number of conversations involving real humans, depicting different circumstances, are fed to the AI system to make it more intelligent. Companies are now trying to taking customer care a notch higher by having intelligent AI system speak live with customers. The AI system needs training on actual conversations to understand the words as well as the context of the conversation.
Demand for AI Solutions Creating Millions of Casual Jobs
Thousands of AI solutions in the pipeline today need such type of training. All this means that a large number of jobs involving mundane tasks are out there. These jobs typically involve tagging and labeling every type of data. Instead of doing everything in-house, companies outsource such mundane jobs to smaller companies who look for people who can work from home on such tasks. Not only would this cost less, but companies can tap into a massive amount of data than possible otherwise. Clickworker GmbH is at the forefront of providing a massive amount of data for AI training by tapping into common people. Around 1 million people contribute to Clickworker GmbH.
These companies try to make mundane jobs interesting for remote workers. For this, they try to add game-like features such as points and badges.
Catching the Fancy of Venture Capitalists
Many such companies are capturing the attention of venture capitalists as well. These include companies such as Alegion, Mighty AI, and CloudFactory. And their client list includes some of the biggest names in technology such as Microsoft, Google, Apple, and IBM.
With humans feeding the human intelligence to AI of tomorrow, the future will see AI and humans working even closer.
