By Howard Leong, Global Alumni Ambassador at JA Worldwide
November 1, 2023
How I wish I had learned if I participated in a JA program again today.
YCombinator, one of the world’s foremost startup accelerators and venture capital firms, has 35% AI startups in their Winter 2023 cohort, up from 15% in the Summer 2022 cohort. Much of the growth in the field of AI is fueled by ChatGPT, a chatbot with human-like intelligence. However, AI (or machine learning, as practitioners name it) has roots dating back to the 1950s.
What is surprising is the growth in the computation power of these AI systems, much aligned with [Moore’s Law](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/mooreslaw.asp#:~:text=In 1965%2C Gordon Moore posited,and more efficient over time.), where Gordan Moore, the Co-founder of Intel, asserts that computational efficiency will grow exponentially over time. As you can see in the graph above, the number of computations trained in AI systems today is mind-boggling to comprehend–and this is just the beginning.
Today, AI systems can outperform 80% of humans in most college-level subjects.
When I attended the University of Oxford to study Artificial intelligence and Machine Learning, I figured I’d be able to clearly understand what these AI systems are doing. To my surprise, though I can logically and mathematically explain the model, I have little to no idea what it is actually doing, a phenomenon called the Black Box.