The role of AI in business

- For thousands of years humans have been using all manner of complex tools to assist in their daily activities. It's what separates us from most of the rest of the animal kingdom. Augmenting our work has largely been welcomed. Over time our tools have become vastly more elaborate and helpful. (machines running) Without machines, for example, the industrial revolutions would have been impossible and the world we know today would not exist. Directly and indirectly these tools and machines have enabled technology that has elevated billions of humans out of extreme poverty. Some human work has been almost completely replaced by technology such as mass production assembly lines. Many areas of our lives of being greatly enhanced such as the utility of smartphones. Today, with a combination of robotics and artificial intelligence or AI, smart machines are designing, developing and deploying solutions with less and less input from humans. AI-enabled capabilities powered by game-changing software and vast amounts of data are demonstrating familiar human behaviors such as problem solving and object recognition. There are few places where artificial intelligence is more apparent today than in our factories and in our businesses. Enterprise applications are increasingly being powered by smart AI-enabled software. Helping to drive and accelerate innovation as well as optimize aspects of the economy such as the supply chain. We also use this software in areas such as financial forecasting, human resources and in product lifecycle management. New AI capabilities are being introduced all the time. Sometimes there is a sudden leap in innovation. In 2020, one such event happened. GPT-3 was introduced to the world. GPT-3 or Generative Preformed Transformer version three, I know a mouthful, I'll stick with GPT-3 for this course, is the latest version of software created by OpenAI, a San Francisco based research laboratory. It has established a new remarkable bar for AI and is welcoming a new era of computing possibilities. Scientists, philosophers and others have called it one of the most interesting and important AI systems ever produced. By processing vast volumes of data from the internet, GPT-3 can automatically generate writing that reads so naturally it appears as if a person wrote it. It can do a lot more too as you'll discover in this course. So let's look at what GPT-3 is, what it can do, the opportunities and challenges it presents and what it may mean to you, your career and your organization.