Every day, each of us comes into contact with AI. We naturally gravitate toward its possibilities, frequently unaware that we owe the comforts of life and a variety of conveniences. Who doesn't use Gmail, Google Translate, a personal assistant with AI, or Netflix recommendations? Additionally, we view dozens of advertisements each day, which are pre-selected for us by algorithms. So how has the application of AI changed over time?

AI timeline - When did it start?

• Thinking in numbers (1763)
• From numbers to poetry (1842)
• "Robot" enters vernacular (1921)
• World War 2 triggers fresh thinking (1942)
• Neurons go artificial (1943)
• Can a machine think? (1949)
• Science fiction steers the conversation (1950)
• A 'top-down' approach (1956)
• "Machine learning" coined (1959)
• 2001: A Space Odyssey imagines where AI could lead (1968)
• Challenging problems to crack (1969)
• The autonomous picture creator (1973)
• A solution for big business (1987)
• From rules to probabilistic learning (1988)
• Back to nature for "bottom-up" inspiration (1990)
• ALICE chatbot learns how to speak from the web (1995)
• Man vs machine: fight of the 20th century (1997)
• The first robot for the home (2002)
• Starting to crack the big problems (2008)
• ImageNet democratizes data (2009)
• Dance bots (2010)
• Man vs machine: fight of the 21st century (2011)
• Learning cat faces (2012)
• The painting fool (2013)
• Are machines intelligent now? (2014)
• Partnership on AI (2016)
• Google Deep Dream is born (2015)
• AI co-produces mainstream pop album (2017)
• AI art makes $432,500 at an auction (2018)
• Machines reflect our consciousness (2018)
• AIArtists.org charts the future (2019)

Alan Mathison Turing, a British mathematician who invented the Turing machine, a device used to perform algorithms, is regarded as the father of AI. Shortly after, the first chess or checkers programmes and others capable of intelligent behaviour in specific situations appeared. 

Pervasive AI

AI applications were at the heart of the most commercially successful areas of computing in the 2010s and have since become a pervasive feature of daily life. 

AI in various fields:

• Search engines - Google Search, 
• Targeting online advertisements - AdSense, Facebook, 
• Recommendation systems - Netflix, YouTube, or Amazon, 
• Driving internet traffic, 
• Virtual assistants - Siri or Alexa, 
• Autonomous vehicles - Drones and self-driving cars, 
• Automatic language translation - Microsoft Translator, Google Translate, 
• Image labelling

Likewise, thousands of successful AI applications solve problems for specific industries or institutions. Energy storage, deepfakes, medical diagnosis, military logistics, and supply chain management are just a few examples.

Notable achievements of AI applications

• Since the 1950s, video games have assessed AI's capabilities. 
• On May 11, 1997, Deep Blue became the first computer chess-playing system to defeat Garry Kasparov, the reigning world chess champion. 
• IBM's question-answering system defeated the two greatest Jeopardy! In Jeopardy, Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings, Champions by a substantial margin! Quiz show exhibition match in 2011. 
• In a match with Go champion Lee Sedol in March 2016, AlphaGo won four out of five games of Go, becoming the first computer Go-playing system to defeat a professional Go player without handicaps. 
• Other programmes, such as Pluribus and Cepheus for superhuman poker, deal with imperfect-information games. 
• DeepMind created a "generalized artificial intelligence" in the 2010s that could learn various Atari games independently.
• Natural Language Processing systems like the massive GPT -3 (at the time, the world's largest artificial neural network) were matching human performance on pre-existing benchmarks by 2020, albeit without the system gaining a commonsense understanding of the benchmarks' contents.
• DeepMind's AlphaFold 2 in 2020 demonstrated the ability to approximate the 3D structure in hours rather than months. 
• In 2019, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) reported that AI was the most prolific emerging technology in patent applications and granted patents, while the Internet of Things was estimated to have the largest market size.

Conclusion

AI is already reshaping our daily lives and the operations of numerous industries and businesses. Additionally, there is no indication that this trend will reverse anytime soon. On the contrary, AI has catalyzed the development of multiple new technologies (such as robotics, big data, and the Internet of Things). Moreover, all indications are that this role will continue in the coming years.