How did we get here?

You can’t move today for mention of AI, but we had expert systems as far back as the early 1970s. We also had robotics, autonomous systems, operational research and statistical methods incorporating probabilistic reasoning. All this led into hybrid systems which combined rules and learning, and then big data, machine learning and a host of new analytical techniques.

Generative AI has become possible by the evolution and combination of five technology capabilities: 

• Internet – unlocking huge data and communications through enabling global connectivity 
• Cloud storage and mobile phones – enabling truly big data available everywhere
• GPUs (Graphics Processing Unit) – enabling parallel computing and making deep learning possible 
• Deep learning – based on neural networks and date which allowed pattern recognition
• Transformers – enabling all this at scale so that generative AI is possible.