My experience with Artificial Intelligence in the real world
My experience with Artificial Intelligence in the real world
Artificial intelligence (AI) or the concept of “thinking machines” was introduced in the mid 19th century. In 1950, the Turing test was developed to test the thinking capacity of machines. Today after almost 70 years, AI is seen as the future by big corporations around the world. Here are some quotes from world leaders around the globe -
“AI is one of the most important things humanity is working on. It is more profound than, I dunno, electricity or fire,” -Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet
“The promise of artificial intelligence and computer science generally vastly outweighs the impact it could have on some jobs in the same way that, while the invention of the airplane negatively affected the railroad industry, it opened a much wider door to human progress.” -Paul Allen, Co-Founder of Microsoft
“A computer is a computer. A computer is just a toy. Man cannot even make a mosquito. So, we should have confidence. Computers only have chips, men have the heart. It’s the heart where the wisdom comes from.” — Jack Ma, Co-founder of Alibaba group
“AI doesn’t have to be evil to destroy humanity — if AI has a goal and humanity just happens in the way, it will destroy humanity as a matter of course without even thinking about it, no hard feelings.” — Elon Musk, Technology Entrepreneur, and Investor.
The above views on Artificial intelligence tells us one thing for certain, Artificial intelligence is playing an important role today and will continue to do so for a long time.
Artificial Intelligence based startup
I have been working for a smart security software company named “Sentry AI” for more than three years now. I joined a 3 member team when the discussion in the company was, how to use Computer Vision (CV) and Machine Learning (ML) for security cameras to help the end user. The goal of Sentry AI is to make cameras smarter and provide security to people. After more than 3 years, SmartSentry software can be enabled on more than 95% of the cameras that exist today and has the best accuracy (based on various feedback and competitions) among all. Since my focus has been mostly on the CV and ML side of things, I have learned/been learning a lot about the real world applications of AI and how it helps reduce human effort by more than 85%.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) to a layman might seem very unidirectional based on the information gained, either from TV shows like Black Mirror or movies like Iron Man. The former has negative connotations while the latter is very optimistic. In Sentry AI, the views are more optimistic and the results are already there for us to see. Even though the AI technology is far from what is shown on television, the practical term that provides more meaning to our product and goal is “Beneficial Intelligence”. Intelligence that works for the benefit of human beings and is a combination of machine intelligence and human intelligence.
Today our team has grown to 18 members with more than 6 security features in production. We are working with 4 major business partners and the cloud API has processed more than 150 million images from security cameras all over the world.
I would be happy to talk more about my journey in an AI based startup and elaborate on different subjects of AI (real world applications and use cases). Please feel free to reach me at ritesh@smarthomesentry.com
Until next time. Cheers!
