Artificial Intelligence to define the world of automation going forward

The Industry today is in a very interesting transformative phase. We talk about AI all the time and yet AI has been in the existence pretty much from the time computer science has made its advent. Vishal Dhupar, Managing Director, South Asia- NVIDIA while highlighting the opportunities of AI, hints at how firms across the globe are fast becoming aware of the power of Artificial Intelligence, Mixed reality, Deep learning and Blockchain - 

The human mind works in 2 modes- Reasoning and Understanding, and yet all AI specialists till date have put their efforts behind reasoning and not understanding. There could be many reasons behind why no one puts effort behind understanding and there are two that stand out- first is that specialists had no clue how to handle understanding and second, there has been very low computing power to manage understanding in machines.

“In 2012, a group of data scientists in Toronto showed to the world that by using neural networks, they could do proto understanding of the machine,” says Vishal Dhupar, Managing Director, South Asia- NVIDIA.“When we talk about AI in simpler words, it is about software writing the software; that algorithm which the world calls as deep learning that runs on super computers, if given your digital experience can indeed learn from you and teach your modules or your models to do more of the same task, specifically when it comes to speech, image and videos. If you have that as a perspective, AI can really augment every single thing that a superhuman was capable of doing at speeds that only superhumans can do. What does it really mean for us?” he questions.

He further adds, “This means that going forward we will need very few software engineers to write software and you will need 50-60 of us to teach our domain to the computer or a machine and the machine will be able to learn, apply and write that software that we couldn’t write to solve the unsolvable. That’s why this observation is transformative.”

It is a question regularly asked if fully autonomous vehicles run in India. If autonomous vehicles are brought to India, will it succeed? It is predicted that every machine will become autonomous in future.

“Humans have taken the first code to make cars autonomous. With people having driven cars for nearly 100 years now and with the set rules and regulations, it is not tough for even a child today to learn driving. In fact you can pass a driving test in just 10 minutes. But it becomes very difficult when you have to codify those driving skills in a vehicle. 

There is a huge economic value for people to move from mechanically driven cars to software driven cars. And that value is on a simple principle in both the cases. In a mechanical car, the value is all about liability. For instance, if your car meets with an accident, or there was a failure of any part, the car would be recalled and the car company has to pay back the customer of whatever damage has been caused. But the future is different; your value of the car increases the moment the car leaves the parking lot. The car now has a sensor and the more sensors you have, the more data you have. The more data you have, the more insights you have,” explains Vishal. 
Vishal further says that the world is very complicated but if it is broken down into an engineering problem, the following 3 steps help one to make anything autonomous –

•    Perception – can the car understand from the cameras and sensors what it is around? Where it is or what it is seeing?
•    Anticipation of what is happening next
•    Finally take an action based on that

“That’s where the pursuit of mankind has been. But this also means that if there are certain software changes, the way we write the workflow changes, the infrastructure changes, the business problem changes, the way we approach problems changes, the way you make money changes and therefore I call it transformative,” says Vishal.

And so...

The world is going to be a completely different place going forward. We are living in a world of amazing software technology that has been developed in due course of time; many of us are users of that technology, while many of us are going to make a sale of that technology. This is also going to be an opportunity and that opportunity is for all of us.

Vishal finally concludes, “If that’s the opportunity then this is the best movement for all of us together and there can’t be a bigger period.” 

Samrita Baruah
samrita@varindia.com